Category Archives: internet research

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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Filed under cultural studies, data culture, internet research

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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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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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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May 17, 2022 · 4:46 pm

workshop: creative methods on digital intimacies, 27 May

GetFileAttachment-1University of Turku, Arcanum A270
 
Workshop: Creative methods on digital intimacies
27 May 2022, 12-15pm
 
Join us for a workshop (live + Zoom) on creative methods for doing and communicating research. Our invited speakers will present their respective projects on digital intimacies and their solutions for both distributing their outcomes to the broader public through unconventional means and incorporating artistic inquiry into their palette of methods. We welcome all participants interested in discussing the intersections of research, creative methods and science communication!
 
Invited talks:
 
Jamie Hakim (King’s College London) & James Cummings (University of York), Digital Intimacies: using fanzines to communicate research on how queer men use smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy (check out their zine here)
 
Antonia Hernández (McGill University), Sexcams in a Dollhouse: creating and using an art-based research device
 
The workshop is organised by the department of Media Studies and the consortium Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland), https://www.dataintimacy.fi/en/

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April 19, 2022 · 9:04 am

panel: why is sex objectionable?

Please join us on Zoom, or in person, should you be in Sydney:

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 • 06:00PM – 07:00PM AEDT (10:00 – 11:00 AM CEST)
Online / Social Sciences Building Seminar Room 210, University of Sydney
Online registration link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Im57SHm9RqCCjG7fd5Fh9g

Despite the significance of sexuality in people’s lives, sex is a topic of constant contestation. This panel asks why sex, particularly mediated depictions of sex, are often termed objectionable. Why are female nipples zoned out from social media? Why is porn framed as a social problem? Join us as our experts discuss what is really at stake in platform regulation of explicit content.

Chair: Professor Kane Race (University of Sydney)

Participants: Professor Kath Albury (Swinburne University of Technology), Professor Alan McKee (UTS), Professor Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku/Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair @SSSHARC, University of Sydney)

https://whatson.sydney.edu.au/event/7ae7ef2c-668b-48ff-a494-168209e76ae6

In person seating is limited so please so please send RSVPs to sssharc.research@sydney.edu.au to ensure your spot.

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March 16, 2022 · 10:05 pm

Sydney

Until end of April, I am Visiting Professor at University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Science as Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair in Sexuality Studies. My visit includes PhD workshops, a public lecture (tba), as well as collaboration with the local research community and my most excellent host, Professor Kane Race, broadly on the topic of sexuality and social media content regulation. Very exciting.

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