Tag: social media

Living in a Time When “Death Feels Closer”

Kristin Gupta February 2, 2021

“I know I’m young, and dying isn’t something I’m ‘supposed’ to think about yet, but how can I not? Death feels like it is everywhere,” earnestly intoned Autumn, a twenty-five-year-old woman I met in late 2020. Autumn was a recent college graduate whose grandfather and roommate had both died during the vicious summer surge of Covid-19 in Los Angeles. The deep sense of loss she felt—not only from their deaths but also from the lack of national acknowledgment—had led her to seek out others whose lives had been touched by death. (read more...)

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The Networked Animita: Transgender Remembrance on Social Media

Baird Campbell November 18, 2020
Este contenido también está disponible en Español.

Tomorrow, November 20th, the world will commemorate Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to collectively mourn and remember those who have died as a result of transphobia. Started in 1999 by US trans woman Gwendolyn Ann Smith, Transgender Day of Remembrance is now observed in countries around the world, including my primary field site, Chile. In this post, I explore how social media might be understood as a technology of memorialization and mourning, especially for marginalized groups. Inspired by informal roadside shrines called animitas, popular in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, I propose the ‘networked animita’ as a useful analytic for understanding trans remembrance online. I do so through an exploration of the digital afterlife of Chilean trans activist, educator, interlocutor, and friend Mara Rita Villaroel Oñate. (read more...)

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#Hashtag: “I AM one of the 1.4 Billion”

Yifan Wang February 24, 2020

When I agreed to write this post in January, I could not have imagined that I would be doing so in quarantine. The state of the coronavirus continues to escalate. I do not yet feel ready to engage with this current event in this blog post, but its weight is present and felt in the writing. On January 17, 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics of China published 2019’s annual economy data (English here). Among the lists of numbers from the world’s second largest economic body — lists that included agricultural and industrial production, the growth of the service sector, and consumption and employment, among others — the section of data about population is what dominated the media’s attention. During the press conference, a Financial Times reporter asked about the lowest-recorded birth rate (10.48‰), its relation to the “two-child policy” and its impact on the (future) economy. This question led to an elaborate response from the bureau commissioner, in an attempt to veil the journalist’s critique (that the termination of the one-child policy failed to reverse structural aging) and place things under a more positive tone: although the rate is low, the actual number of newborns is still pretty high. (read more...)

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Technologies of Representation: Possibilities of Social Media in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul

Alize Arıcan February 6, 2020

“Every week somebody comes here to take photos of our laundry and put it up on the internet. Today, I took one and put it up right here. It’s not our laundry, but it’s a bear. This might be a dump, but this is my dump, and I care about what goes on the internet about it.” (read more...)

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Innocent images? The ethics of sharing your children’s photos online

Caitlin Wylie December 24, 2019

There are collections of embarrassing childhood photos stashed in most parents’ homes. Everyone remembers an instance when those photos unexpectedly appeared in ways that were awkward or humiliating, such as in a graduation slideshow or the stereotyped first-date-meets-the-parents scenario. For previous generations, those images were hard-copy, faded, dog-eared, and easy to hide under your bed. They also came in limited supply, due to the costs of cameras, film, and film processing. For today’s children (and parents), things are different. We create more images thanks to the cameras on mobile phones, share them more widely through the internet, and have no idea how to destroy them. In this evolving sociotechnical reality, what should parents do? Should we succumb to the social pressure to share online photos of our children’s most adorable and incriminating moments, thereby “sharenting”? (And even make money from it, as social media influencers?) Or should we respect our children’s right to privacy and control over images of themselves? (read more...)

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Before They Erase It: Memory and the social media archive

Nell Haynes, Baird Campbell November 12, 2019
Disponible en español aquí.

This afternoon, I began to notice increasingly alarming images, posts, and tweets from my interlocutors in Santiago. It appeared that Santiago was on fire, and that the military was in the streets. Images of familiar streets and landmarks now felt doubly familiar, as their similarity to images taken during the coup of 1973 were undeniable. A quick Google search confirmed my fears; Piñera had declared a state of emergency in response to the student metro protests, that there were already deaths, disappearances, and torture reported, and that a curfew had been implemented. Switching over to Whatsapp, I sent frantic messages to my interlocutors and former host family to check that they were safe (they were.) However, it was clear that—even for seasoned activists—this felt different. Many recalled memories or iconic images of the 1973 coup, wondering if history might be about to repeat itself. As the day progressed, I began (read more...)

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Content Moderation: Mediating Public Speech Privately

Mehtab Khan September 24, 2019

Social media constitutes a universe of more images, text and videos than can be humanly experienced, read, and heard. However, disinformation, terrorist content, harassment, and other kinds of negative content have made ‘content moderation’ one of the most pressing demands from large online communication platforms (“intermediaries”), such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Every single day, major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube receive thousands of requests to review or take down content that violates their internal policies or an external law. Sometimes they receive requests, both from the US government and foreign governments, for information on users, or to censor specific people and accounts. Content moderation can be defined as “the organized practice of screening user-generated content (UGC) posted to Internet sites, social media, and other online outlets, in order to determine the appropriateness of the content for a given site, locality, or jurisdiction” (Roberts 2017). The rules for content (read more...)

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“India’s Gig-work Economy” Roundtable

noopur raval September 5, 2019

This roundtable discussion marks the end of our series on India’s Gig-work Economy. In this discussion, we reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for research on the topic. Here are some highlights from the discussion. Listen to the audio track below or read the transcript for the full discussion Anushree (researcher, taxi-driving in Mumbai): “Something that came out during field work was the flow of workers from traditional services to app-based services which kind of happened in phases and all these platforms have played a different function in the history of this. While the radio taxis were more important in teaching workers to become professionals in the service economy the new platforms have given them a larger customer base and hired access to audience.” (read more...)

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