Category Archives: internet research

December 21, 2025 · 6:23 pm

hot connections

Our book, Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter, coauthored with Jenny Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, will be out in March on open access with the MIT Press: very exciting conclusion to what has been such an enjoyable collaboration within the Rethinking Sexuality project. As has been the case with my previous books with the publisher, the cover design is fabulous. This is the summary:

A rethinking of “the social” in social media which includes the sexual.

What can we learn from including sexual platforms in definitions of social media and, by extension, from including sex in definitions of “the social” itself? Hot Connections explores three locally operating sexual platforms: the Swedish Darkside, used by kink and BDSM practitioners; the Estonian Libertine Center, used mainly by nonmonogamous people; and the Finnish Alastonsuomi, used for a wide variety of nude and sexual displays of self-expression. What avenues do these platforms open for understanding the role that sexuality plays in people’s networked routines, social bonds, and forms of relating?

Sexual social media affords freedom of worldmaking, belonging, and a right to sexually exist. While providing vital spaces for sexual self-expression—and indeed, hot connections—platform connectivity also involves friction as expectations, wishes, and desires clash and collide.

Intervening in debates on the value of sexual social media, Hot Connections discusses what it means to research sexuality when sexual data is understood as sensitive by default, what platform governance may look like if viewed from the margins, and how sex and intimacy are not the same thing in networked sexuality.

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Filed under academic pleasures, feminist media studies, internet research, NSFW, sexuality

September 4, 2025 · 5:21 pm

absurdity, Twitter comedy, and humor bots

It is no breaking news that, in internet research, things very quickly become recent history. Especially when it comes to handbooks that take some years to put together. Hence, behold!, our chapter with the excellent Jenny Sundén on Twitter’s (now X) humor bots (out of operation since 2023) for The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy edited by Peter C. Kunze and William V. Constanzo. The abstract goes like this:

This chapter explores the world of Twitter bots (on the verge of Elon Musk’s rebranding and decision to charge for the platform’s API) from a particular angle: that of absurd humor. It builds on and advances discussions of absurd humor in general—and feminist and queer humor and absurdity in particular—by studying Twitter bots as part of a landscape where absurd humor is generated in algorithmic assemblages of human imagination and nonhuman repetition and randomness. It explores a strategic selection of humorous Twitter bot accounts, combined with background interviews with two of their creators, operating with slightly different logics: Gender of the day (@genderoftheday), which generated imaginative, poetic, and charmingly nonsensical takes on what the gender of the day could be when capaciously envisioned; a bookish kind of humor generated by Victorian queerbot (@queerstreet), which scoured digitized nineteenth-century novels for the terms “gay” and “queer”; and the eerie flora and fauna coined by the fabulously surrealist poetry bot British Gardens (@GardensBritish). The absurd represents the opposite of reason, rationality, and meaning, as its etymological Latin root, absurdus (“out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous”), suggests. Following this semantic route, absurd humor is out of harmony with reason and notions of decency. The chapter focuses on what happens to such incongruity when it involves not only people but algorithms, and what may be learned about the pleasures of repetition, randomness, and surprise and the minor mundane affective lifts this affords by studying the bots’ output.

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Filed under academic pleasures, data culture, humor, internet research, media studies

November 27, 2024 · 4:02 pm

in/conveniences

Screenshot 2024-11-27 at 17.54.40In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround edited Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg is out just now with the Insititute of Network Cultures’ Theory on Demand series. The collection covers a lot of ground and also includes my bit, “Platform economies, reputational stains, and the in/conveniences of porn”, a Lauren Berlant-inspired essay on porn’s current financial deplatforming and the moral platform imaginaries that this involves. All on open access!

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

January 25, 2024 · 7:29 pm

cursed tweets

After quite a rocky history of rejects and revisions, our article with Elena Pilipets, Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump’s deselection, is out with The International Journal of Cultural Studies. Nice and quirky. With an abstract that goes like this:

On 7 November 2020, strange things were happening in the comments to @realDonaldTrump’s tweet erroneously arguing that he had won the US presidential election, ‘BY A LOT’. Posting quote tweets and replies in Armenian in tandem with ‘cursed images’, memes, and creepypasta, users engaged in a spam-like trollish intervention, even as Twitter kept removing the said content in real time. Exploring this online incident through various analytical techniques, this article first attends to absurdity and ephemerality within the polarized social media event. Second, it makes an argument for the productivity of digital methods in cultural studies inquiry aiming to understand the temporal, contextual, and infrastructural aspects of memetic commenting. Third, by focusing on the social (media) theatre of Armenian curses, we make a case for the analytical importance of studying materials deemed niche and anomalous in networked exchanges.

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January 3, 2024 · 1:05 pm

intimate infrastructures

An essay we did jointly with the IDA research team is freshly out with Media Theory’s special section edited by Carolyn Pedwell and Simon Dawes, “Lauren Berlant and Media Theory” (OA). Authored by Vilja Jaaksi, Anu Koivunen, Kaarina Nikunen, Karoliina Talvitie-Lamberg, Annamari Vänskä and myself, the piece is titled “Intimate infrastructures we depend upon: Living with data” and the abstract goes likes this:

This essay takes on Lauren Berlant’s mapping of intimacy as ‘connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living’ in order to address attachments, dependencies, and vulnerabilities in datafied contexts where digital platforms operate as infrastructures of everyday life. Building on interview material, we explore such intimate attachments as ones rife with friction and inconvenience, asking how vulnerabilities emerge and become differently distributed among our study participants. We argue that thinking about the datafied everyday in terms of intimacy opens up space for considering the fundamental ambiguities involved in what matters to people, what they are attached to, and what they simply need to live with. We further suggest that attending to the complexity and vitality of mundane relating, impacting, and world-making offers ways of exploring techno-capitalist infrastructures of data extraction and mass surveillance in tandem with other attachments and connections that bind, and matter.

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Filed under data culture, internet research, intimacy, media studies

November 16, 2023 · 5:40 pm

vanilla normies and fellow pervs

Our article with Katrin Tiidenberg, Jenny Sundén and Maria Vihlman is out today on OA with Sexualities. Vanilla normies and fellow pervs: Boundary work on sexual platforms continues our study of local sexual platforms within the Rethinking Sexuality and Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture projects, paving way for our book on the topic currently under contract with MITP. The abstract goes like this:

Building on a study of three Nordic and Baltic digital sexual platforms, this article analyzes the perceptions of enjoyable sex and sexual belonging among 60 people, who self-identify as sexually liberal. In dialogue with Gayle Rubin’s formative work on sexual hierarchies and “good sex,” we explore our participants’ complex and often ambiguous sexual boundary work to delineate liberated sex. Independent of particular preferences (non-monogamy, BDSM, fetishism, and exhibitionism), liberated sex for our participants is definitionally enjoyable and articulated via an aspirational hierarchy based on willingness, diversity/variability, and self-reflexivity—partly set against national sexual imaginaries of vanilla normalcy, yet allowing vanilla some gradations and nuances.

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

January 16, 2023 · 10:46 am

about sex, open-mindedness, and cinnamon buns

Our article with Jenny Sundén, Katrin Tiidenberg and Maria Vihlman, titled “About Sex, Open-Mindedness, and Cinnamon Buns: Exploring Sexual Social Media“, is just out (on OA) with Social Media + Society. It’s the second joint article coming out from our collaborative project on local sexual platforms, with more to come.

And here’s the abstract: General purpose social media platforms—often incited by American legislation—increasingly exclude sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety. This article analyzes interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi, and Libertine.Center) to explore what follows from including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media and, by extension, in including sex in definitions of “the social” itself. We found that instead of context collapse, the users and developers of the studied sites operate with what we call context promiscuity, blending boundaries, but maintaining their structural integrity. This allows for a particular silosociality to emerge based on experiences of safety, risk, and consent. Building on this, we propose thinking of sexual expression as something not contained by, but put in motion across platforms, user cultures, content policies, and sexual norms. Rather than framing sexual social media exchanges in terms of their perceived risks and harms, we would do well to also inquire after the risks and harms involved in ousting sex from networked forms of sociality. Deplatforming of sex truncates our ways of understanding what interests, forces, and attachments drive our sociality. Yet, when analyzing social media as if the socio-sexual matters, platforms designed to support sexual displays and connections become vital nodal points in social media ecologies.

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Filed under academic pleasures, cultural studies, feminist media studies, internet research, NSFW, sexuality

November 7, 2022 · 1:53 pm

Natalie Wood Day

Co-authored with Tanya Horeck, our article “Natalie Wood Day”: Sexual Violence and Celebrity Remembrance in the #MeToo Era is freshly out with Celebrity Studies. Not on open access, alas, but here’s a manuscript version at least. The abstract reads like this:

This article inquires after the ethics of posthumous outing and networked forms of remembrance connected to public figures accused of, or having admitted to, sexual violence and domestic abuse. Focusing on the obituary politics surrounding the 2020 deaths of Kirk Douglas, Kobe Bryant, and Sean Connery, it explores the forms that a feminist ethics of disclosure and memorialisation might take in the #MeToo era. Contra the popular tendency of othering sex offenders as exceptional ‘monsters,’ #MeToo’s affective and discursive force lies in framing sexual violence as unextraordinary, banal, and ubiquitous. In what follows, we make a case for forms of remembrance acknowledging that a person can simultaneously be an accomplished professional, a loving parent, and a rapist, so that one aspect of one’s being and actions need not require silence over others. Reflecting on what it means to remember public figures in their totality, we flag the importance of attending to the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts that have contributed to the prominence, and subsequent remembrance of individuals. We argue that such a contextual move makes it possible to see the individual public figure within the social networks and hierarchies that have allowed, or disallowed, patterns of behaviour.

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Filed under cultural studies, feminist media studies, internet research

September 16, 2022 · 12:39 pm

locating sex

Locating Sex: Regional Geographies of Sexual Social Media, the first article on our study of Swedish, Estonian and Finnish sexual platforms with Jenny Sundén, Katrin Tiidenberg and Maria Vihlman, is out on OA with Gender, Place & Culture. This is a collab between the Rethinking Sexuality project and the IDA consortium, with more to follow. Here’s the abstract:

Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish platform for kink and BDSM, and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression, we ask how these contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. First, we focus on the platforms as tools for digital wayfinding and hooking up. Second, we consider how the platforms help to reimagine and sexualize physical locations as ones of play, and how this transforms the ways of inhabiting such spaces. Third, we analyze how the platforms operate as sexual places in their own right, designed to accommodate certain forms of display, relating, and belonging. We argue, in particular, that these platforms shape how users imagine and engage with location by negotiating notions of proximity and distance, risk and safety, making space for sexual sociability. We approach geographies of sexuality both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in local spaces of sexual play. As sexual content is increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms, we argue that locally operating platforms provide a critical counterpoint, allowing for a vital re-platforming of sex on a regional level.

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Filed under data culture, feminist media studies, internet research, NSFW, sexuality

June 10, 2022 · 4:42 pm

rethinking dick pics

9780367756413Building on the work we started with the NSFW book, Ben Light, Kylie Jarrett and I just have a fresh article out with Routledge’s Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: Original Essays. 4th Edition, edited by Nancy L. Fischer, Laurel Westbrook and Steven Seidelman. Titled “Rethinking Dick Pics”, it encourages readers to consider dick pics in context. An intro excerpt:

“Although nude selfies of women are seen as indicative of sexual titillation and availability, similar images of men’s bodies – and dick pics in particular – open up a broader and more ambiguous spectrum of interpretations, from sexual invitation to harassment, gendered violence, and humor. Dick pics are therefore part of complicated and diverse socio-technical arrangements so that contextual nuance is necessary for understanding both their intended functions and the experiences that they give rise to. Dick pics certainly can be, and are used as, instruments of gender-based harassment, yet they also come embedded in more diverse and complex – occasionally desired and reciprocal – social exchanges and attachments.”

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