Tag: social media

Female Truck Drivers in China Navigate Gender Norms on Douyin

Anna Zhang August 22, 2023
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It’s dark outside: 4:34 AM. I am peering through a truck’s windshield, gazing at a seemingly endless stretch of highway. “Female truck driver Li Ping is live streaming,” reads the title above the Douyin video player. It’s accompanied by the option to follow Li Ping’s account. Li Ping and her sister converse with fans, their voices audible, but the camera remains directed out the window, capturing the drive and road ahead. “Have you all woken up from a night of sleep?” a voice asks. It belongs to Li Ping’s younger sister, whose weariness is evident in the countless yawns that follow. The chat springs to life as fans engage, their messages reflecting varied states of wakefulness: some have just risen, some couldn’t fall asleep, and others are truck drivers like Li Ping who have been awake and on the road. A robotic navigation voice reminds them to take a break. The camera captures the uninterrupted expanse of mountains; rest stops and service areas are nowhere in sight. Fans implore Li Ping’s sister to turn the camera and reveal herself and her sister. She replies, enticing them with the promise that if gifts are given, they will be granted a glimpse. The navigation voice reminds them again to take a break. They continue driving on. Below, a row of vibrant stickers awaits my interaction, offering the opportunity to support Li Ping through virtual items like hearts, flower bouquets, and cars, which streamers can later cash out for real money. (read more...)

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Becoming a Socialite: How Virtual “Fakeness” Produces Material Realities among Urban Chinese Gay Men

Yifeng Troy Cai June 20, 2023

On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated. Offline, the person might barely resemble their profile. The lived experiences of Chinese gay men, however, show us that the fake is not always antithetical to the real. The fake, under certain circumstances, could enact material realities of its own. Gay socialites (同志名媛, tongzhi mingyuan) in urban China’s gay community are cases in point. (read more...)

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Digital Multiples and Social Media

Nicole Taylor, Mimi Nichter March 28, 2023
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In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to explore the multiple, dynamic expressions of self across online contexts (Nichter and Taylor 2022). This concept emerged from our ethnographic research with more than 100 college students exploring sociality, emotional expression, and online identity work. Our methods for this study included in-depth interviews, focus groups, writing prompts, and long-term participant observation in students’ social media sites. (read more...)

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Beauty Filters: New Tech, Old Problems

Dolly Church November 29, 2022

Retaining a youthful appearance is a laborious and painful exercise, often rife with invisible labor. Digital beauty tech has made it much easier. Rather than altering our own faces through cosmetic procedures, we now have a conduit — an online persona — that can easily be touched up with the help of beauty editing apps or filters. This has done little to challenge ageist prejudices but has offered an avenue out of old age in the form of customization. In offering up this tech, the beauty industry can be seen to perform a bait-and-switch, displacing the weight of beauty standards from physical appearance onto our consumer choices. (read more...)

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Platypod, Episode Four: Connections and Disconnections on Social Media

Baird Campbell, Ilana Gershon October 27, 2022
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In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Baird Campbell (Rice University) and Ilana Gershon (Indiana University Bloomington). They discuss the politics of connection and disconnection via social media in Chile and the US. (read more...)

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Photoshopping Desire: Gender, Caste, and the “Authentic” Self

Lakshita Malik September 6, 2022
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In an Instagram post by a photographer @photo_paparazzo, we see what the labor of creating a perfect picture looks like. The video, set to trending music, shows a woman in a bridal outfit being helped up a wooden ladder to the roof of a room on a terrace by three men. One of the men is holding a camera. Once the woman is on the roof, the photographer takes the mesh maroon-colored dupatta and wears it over his head, presumably to show the bride how to pose. The text on the video reads, “What goes behind creating that “ONE PERFECT SHOT” for our brides @photo_paparazzo.” The caption reads: “To one of the favourite parts of our job, creating EFFORTLESSLY beautiful portraits and memories for the brides to remember (cry-laughing emoji)…kudos to the team and most important each and every bride of @photo_paparazzo and being the sport of our creativity (red heart emoji).” The video ends with two stunning shots of the bride, captured in the golden yellow light from a setting sun (what is referred to as the golden hour). The video has amassed 6.7 million views, 970 thousand likes, and 1,571 comments. A cursory look at the comments reveals positive reception of the video. The comments range from the use of only emojis (fire emoji, red heart emojis, heart eyes emoji, among others) reflecting appreciation to more overt comments acknowledging and recognizing the efforts put in by the photographers. One particular comment on the post, however, deviates from this general trend and points out how the same effect could have been achieved using far simpler techniques that did not require the bride to be helped up a rickety ladder. Part of the comments reads, “You guys could have easily went to any open space and put her on a stool or something .” The OP (Original Poster) replies to the commenter, “Simple things don’t get you extra ordinary results (upside down smiley emoji).” Another commenter adds to this discourse, “ is photoshop is made for joke 3min work with 2022 edition .” (read more...)

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Revisiting Human-Machine Relationships and Efforts of Feminist STS

Doyeon Shin May 3, 2022
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Alexa, Bixby, the GPS voice, Siri.… AI (Artificial Intelligence) assistants, which operate through algorithms and also produce them, have restructured our everyday lives: from listening to music to getting a sense of where we are (if the GPS is working properly). For users, these “assistants” have become integral parts of our everyday lives. Human-machine communication, in turn, has become more intimate than ever before. However, little effort has been made to understand this intimacy between humans and machines. Instead, much attention has been centered on the increasing obsolescence of technology, as newer models and gadgets enter the market. To recognize machines as sociable and understand human-machine relationships from a different perspective, I revisit feminist STS (Science and Technology Studies) scholars’ works. Furthermore, I look at smartphones, which are usually only considered as hosts for the immaterial AI, as social. (read more...)

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Heritage, Memory, and Infrastructure

Jasmine Reid September 14, 2021
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There are places and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided. Many are sites of war – Concord and Lexington, Appomattox, Gettysburg. Others are sites that symbolize the daring of America’s character – Independence Hall and Seneca Falls, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral. Selma is such a place. In one afternoon 50 years ago, so much of our turbulent history – the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war; the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow; the death of four little girls in Birmingham; and the dream of a Baptist preacher – all that history met on this bridge. (President Barack Obama, March 2015) Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 March to Montgomery, President Obama delivered these words to honor the traumatic history of Bloody Sunday. With “history me on this bridge,” the bridge stood as a sinister totem to a period of violence that Obama, as the first Black president, had seemingly redeemed, representing the promise of a new American nation that elected what it had once lynched. (read more...)

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