Category Archives: media studies
…and it is out!
Filed under academic pleasures, internet research, intimacy, media studies, NSFW, sexuality
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.
Filed under academic pleasures, data culture, humor, internet research, media studies
a roundtable on the future of porn studies
Our roundtable discussion, Shaping Pleasure, Shifting Boundaries: A Roundtable on the Future of Porn Studies with Peter Alilunas, João Florêncio, Angela Jones and myself, is out as part of Porn Studies journal’s tenth anniversary thingie. And this is the abstract:
The roundtable, ‘Shaping Pleasure, Shifting Boundaries: A Roundtable on the Future of Porn Studies,’ took place in June 2024 via Zoom and was recorded, transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. The roundtable was intended to examine the transformative trajectory of porn studies over the last decade. With a focus on technological innovations, ethical challenges, and the labour dynamics reshaping the field, the following discussion explores how intersectionality and diverse methodologies have broadened perspectives within porn studies. Our participants also talked about the rise of platforms like OnlyFans, the impact of archival gaps, and the continuing critical tension between pleasure and danger in academic and cultural narratives. Their conversation underscores the necessity of rethinking traditional paradigms while advocating for inclusivity and the preservation of pornographic histories as part of broader cultural heritage. This conversation sets the stage for envisioning the discipline’s future as it navigates a rapidly evolving sociopolitical and technological landscape.
Filed under academic pleasures, media studies, NSFW, porn studies, sexuality
zoned in and out
The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences edited by Annette Hill and Peter Lunt is just out, or at least on preorder. The massive whopper includes my bit, titled “Bored audiences: Zoned in and out” which addresses casual gaming as oscillations of interest and boredom in order to consider these concepts on less binary terms. The abstract goes like this:As affective flatness entailing a sense of stuckness in the present, boredom is routinely cast as the conceptual and experiential opposite of interest indicative of the richness of experience. Taking a different analytical route, this chapter makes an argument for considering boredom and interest in dynamic relation with one another as oscillations in affective intensity. It further calls for adding nuance into what boredom actually means by addressing the dynamics of casual gameplay in the context of the limitations on mobility and stimulus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Characterised by mass appeal, short play sessions, clear rules, and ease of play, casual games are repetitive, and hence potentially boring, while also routinely used as escapes from boredom, and for filling up time. Starting with conceptualisations of boredom as a modern phenomenon, as the conceptual and experiential opposite of interest indicative of the richness of experience, and as a problem endemic to the attention economies of app culture, this chapter asks what the notion means in the current conjuncture of ubiquitous connectivity and mediated engagement. Through a discussion of casual gaming, it sets out to add nuance to what boredom stands for, and how it becomes diagnosed. Deploying ambiguity as an analytical lens, the chapter then addresses boredom as fluctuating rhythms of experience yielding languor, both pleasurable and very much not.
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, cultural studies, media studies
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.
Filed under data culture, internet research, intimacy, media studies
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.
technopharmacology is out!
Co-authored with the excellent Joshua Neves, Aleena Chia and Ravi Sundaram, Technopharmacology is just out with University of Minnesota Press in the In search of media series and as an open access book with Meson Press. The book explores the close relations of media technologies to pharmaceuticals and pharmacology and calls for expanding media theoretical inquiry by attending to the biological, neurological, and pharmacological dimensions of media and centers on emergent affinities between big data and big pharma. My section focuses on diagnoses of online porn addiction and makes an argument for attending to the excitements that make the self. This was fun to make.
Filed under affect theory, data culture, media studies, sexuality
multiplatform 2022: corporealities
Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities, a Conference on Bodies and Embodiment in Games at the Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre has been moved online due to pending rail strikes. Should you be interested in my keynote on sex, play and networked pleasures on Friday, June 23, Zoom is now an option.
Filed under academic pleasures, media studies, play, sexuality
more intimacy in data-driven culture
Happy news! Our Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture consortium got funding for 2022-2025 from the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland. During the second funding period we’ll continue to probe vulnerabilities connected to datafication among different groups of people with a cross-disciplinary research team at University of Turku, Tampere University, Aalto University and Åbo Akademi University. As PI, am feeling very, very fortunate.
Filed under academic pleasures, data culture, media studies
workshop: creative methods on digital intimacies, 27 May
University of Turku, Arcanum A270
Susanna Paasonen 