Category Archives: data culture

September 24, 2021 · 1:28 pm

sex in the shadows of celebrity

Our short piece on shadowbanning, Sex in the Shadows of Celebrity, written together with the wonderful Dr Carolina Are, is out on OA with Porn Studies as part of a forthcoming special issue on the deplatforming of sex in social media. Here’s the abstract:

Shadowbanning is a light censorship technique used by social media platforms to limit the reach of potentially objectionable content without deleting it altogether. Such content does not go directly against community standards so that it, or the accounts in question, would be outright removed. Rather, these are borderline cases – often ones involving visual displays of nudity and sex. As the deplatforming of sex in social media has accelerated in the aftermath of the 2018 FOSTA/SESTA legislation, sex workers, strippers and pole dancers in particular have been affected by account deletions and/or shadowbanning, with platforms demoting, instead of promoting, their content. Examining the stakes involved in the shadowbanning of sex, we focus specifically on the double standards at play allowing for ‘sexy’ content posted by or featuring celebrities to thrive while marginalizing or weeding out posts by those affiliated with sex work.

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Filed under academic pleasures, data culture, feminist media studies, NSFW, sexuality

June 28, 2021 · 10:23 am

social media and sexual rights

Our article with Sanna Spisak, Elina Pirjatanniemi, Tommi Paalanen and Maria Vihlman, with the whopper of a name, “Social Networking Sites’ Gag Order: Commercial Content Moderation’s Adverse Implications for Fundamental Sexual Rights and Wellbeing” is just out with Social Media and Society (OA). It’s one outcome of our ongoing project, Intimacy in Data-Drive Culture, and the abstract goes like this:

This article critically investigates the reasoning behind social media content policies and opaque data politics operations regarding sexual visual social media practices and sexual talk, asking what is at stake when social media giants govern sexual sociability on an international scale. Focusing on Facebook, in particular, this article proposes an alternative perspective for handling various expressions of sexuality in social media platforms by exploring the wide-ranging ramifications of community standards and commercial content moderation policies based on them. Given that sexuality is an integral part of human life and as such protected by fundamental human rights, we endorse the freedom of expression as an essential legal and ethical tool for supporting wellbeing, visibility, and non-discrimination. We suggest that social media content policies should be guided by the interpretive lens of fundamental human rights. Furthermore, we propose that social media content policies inclusive of the option to express consent to access sexual content are more ethical and just than those structurally erasing nudity and sexual display.

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April 15, 2021 · 2:39 pm

dependent, distracted, bored!

screenshot-2020-12-05-at-15.37.49My book very long in the making, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media, is out April 20 with MIT Press. To mark the occasion, I’m doing an IIPC debate talk the day after summing up some of its central themes and points. Join us April 21, 5:15pm EET, at https://utu.zoom.us/j/67932423692. This is the abstract:

According to a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade, we are addicted to the digital devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, which drive us to boredom and harm our capacities to focus, relate, remember, and be. Focusing on three affective formations — dependence, distraction, and boredom — as key to understanding both the landscape of contemporary networked media and the concerns connected to it, this talk challenges the dominant narrative and argues for the centrality of accounting for complexity and ambiguity instead. Dependence and agency, distraction and attention, boredom and excitement can be seen as dynamics that enmesh, oscillate, enable, and depend on one another — and, in some instances, cannot be told apart.

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April 1, 2021 · 8:06 pm

shameless dicks

A new special issue edited by Gaby David and Amparo Lasén on Shame, Shaming and Online Image Sharing is just out with First Monday, with loads of stuff I’m looking forward to reading. It also includes an article we did with Jenny Sundén, titled Shameless dicks: On male privilege, dick pic scandals, and public exposure. And here’s the abstract:

Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics of men of notable social privilege, asking what kinds of media events such leaked data assemble, how penises become sites of public interest and attention, and how these bodies may be able to escape circuits of public shaming. By focusing on high-profile incidents on an international scale during the past decade, this article moves from the leaked shots of male politicians as governance through shaming to body-shaming targeted at Harvey Weinstein, to Jeff Bezos’s refusal to be shamed through his hacked dick pic, and to an accidentally self-published shaft shot of Lars Ohly, a Swedish politician, we examine the agency afforded by social privilege to slide through shame rather than be stuck in it. By building on feminist media studies and affect inquiry, we attend to the specificities of these attempts to shame, their connections to and disconnections from slut-shaming, and the possibilities and spaces offered for laughter within this all.

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Filed under affect theory, data culture, feminist media studies, internet research, sexuality

March 24, 2021 · 4:53 pm

technology, knowledge & society

The 17th Technology, Knowledge & Society conference, hosted by University of Melbourne and held entirely online, takes place April 8-9, 2021, with the overall theme “Considering Viral Technologies: Pandemic-Driven Opportunities and Challenges”. Very excited about doing a live plenary & garden conversation (8 April 2021 08:00AM CST Chicago // 8 April 2021 16:00PM Finland // 8 April 2021 11:00PM Melbourne) around my soon out book, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP).

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March 8, 2021 · 6:59 pm

deep mediations

Screenshot 2021-03-08 at 20.52.33Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures, edited by Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible for University of Minnesota Press, is just out and includes a discussion we did together with Shaka McGlotten and John Paul Stadler, titled “The Deep Realness of Deepfake Pornography”.
For those interested, there’s a 40% discount in the US til April 15: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book…/collections/mla-2021…
and a 30% discount on pre-orders in the UK with the code CSFS2021: https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/97815…/deep-mediations/

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February 12, 2021 · 12:30 pm

dependent, distracted, bored, in Padova

JPoster_A4_stampa_Ultimo_compressed-e1612783225291oin us February 25 for a webinar with the Padova Science, Technology & Innovation Studies (3pm, GMT+1). I’ll be talking on my forthcoming book on affective formations in networked media (out in April with MITP), with an intro from Cosimo Marco Scarcelli (University of Padova) and with Manolo Farci (University of Urbino) and Paolo Magaudda (University of Padova) as discussants.

Register here:  https://unipd.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dUESW2T5TlqrAKGPmiERUw

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February 4, 2021 · 9:09 am

intimacy

Join us February 11, 7pm CET, for a Zoom chat on sex and online platforms, under the title “Infrastructures of Intimacy and the Deplatforming of Sex”. Mine is the first talk in INTIMACY series organized collaboratively by Schwules Museum, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL), and ICI Berlin — with Jean-Luc Nancy and Tim Dean coming up in March and April. For registration go to the ICI Berlin website: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/susanna-paasonen/

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December 21, 2020 · 2:57 pm

mediating presents

cover_issue_7_en_USMediating Presents, a special issue I coedited with the fantastic Rebecca Coleman, is just out with Media Theory (on open access). As we suggest in our summary, “it is both productive and necessary to think together ‘the present’ and mediation to understand how various interlocking aspects of socio-cultural life are currently produced, organised and arranged, embodied and affectively experienced. The contributions to the special issue see time not as a neutral backdrop to, but as actively constituted by and constitutive of, (digital) media, and develop broad understandings of both media and the temporality of the present/present temporalities. The special issue develops theoretically informed and engaged understandings of digital media presents, drawing from and expanding a range of theoretical traditions, including feminist, queer and anti-racist theory, science and technology studies, media theory, philosophy and cultural theory. They similarly take seriously an array of objects, practices and processes, extending from public and academic debates and figurations, mundane and routinised activities, the affordances of specific platforms and computational and data-driven software.”

Contributors include Xin Liu, Beckie Coleman, Ella Harris, Chris Ingraham, Nishat Awan, Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting and Tony D. Sampson – plus yours truly with Distracted Present, Golden Past? critically examining zeitgeist diagnoses equating networked media with notions of loss.

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December 15, 2020 · 11:34 am

nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure

Our “Nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure: NSFW critique of Tumblr censorship” is just out on open access with New Media & Society. Elena Pilipets is very much the first author with her methods magic.

And here’s the abstract: In November 2018, after being suspended from Apple’s App Store for hosting child pornography, Tumblr announced its decision to ban all NSFW (not safe/suitable for work) content with the aid of machine-learning classification. The decision to opt for strict terms of use governing nudity and sexual depiction was as fast as it was drastic, leading to the quick erasure of subcultural networks developed over a decade. This article maps out platform critiques of and on Tumblr through a combination of visual and digital methods. By analyzing 7306 posts made between November 2018 (when Tumblr announced its new content policy) and August 2019 (when Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic), we explore the key stakes and forms of user resistance to Tumblr “porn ban” and the affective capacities of user-generated content to mobilize engagement.

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Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, data culture, internet research, NSFW