Edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein and Indira Neill Hoch, the 404 pages of A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures are out with University of Michigan Press, on open access. This monumental work also includes a conversation on Tumblr porn we did with Alex Cho and Noah Tsika, titled “Walled Gardens, NSFW Niches, and Horizontality,” before the platform introduced the NSFW ban late in 2018. How soon things become history, and oh how sorely the old Tumblr is missed!
Filed under academic pleasures, internet research, media studies, NSFW, porn studies
Affective Politics of Digital Media: Propaganda by Other Means, edited by Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis for Routledge. Not only does it have a great cover but an excellent lineup of authors, and it includes an interview “Affect, Media, Movement” with Zizi Papacharissi and me. And this is the general rationale:
This interdisciplinary, international collection examines how sophisticated digital practices and technologies exploit and capitalize on emotions, with particular focus on how social media are used to exacerbate social conflicts surrounding racism, misogyny, and nationalism.
Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, “fake news,” and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists.
The book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.
An article we did with Daniel Cardoso asking why people publish print magazines (of the post-porn kind, broadly construed) these days, is just out with Porn Studies as “The Value of print, the value of porn“, with free eprints through the link. The article is based on interviews with the makers of two independent magazines, Ménage à trois and Phile, and it explores a range of things from sexual politics to influences and the material properties of paper.
Filed under academic pleasures, media studies, porn studies
I’ve described my past few years as exceptionally crazy work-wise and it’s not just a figment of my melodramatic imagination. Many Splendored Things (2018) and NSFW (2019, with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light) were both mainly written in 2017. We coined the prospectus for Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media with Jenny Sundén in December 2017, wrote it in 2018-2019, and the book will be out this November. The proposal for Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism with Feona Attwood, John Mercer, Alan McKee and Clarissa Smith was done two years ago and the actual thing is due out August. Last but not least, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media, for which I started collecting material back in 2012, has a due-date for March. One book already has a cover (with Barbie! and glitter!), am looking forward to the other designs materializing.
Very glad that our Affective Body Politics special issue, coedited with Kaisu Hynnä-Granberg and Mari Lehto, is now out with Social media + society, on open access. The eight articles are based on presentations at the Affective Politics of Social Media symposium that we organized at University of Turku in 2017, and they explore all kinds of things from Reddit tributing to debates on public breastfeeding, Chaturbate, #MeToo, Netflix bingeing, fat activism and the online platforms of Transgender Nation.
Edited by Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve, Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language, is out with Routledge. It has a fabulous lineup, from Anna Gibbs to Britta Timm Knudsen and Ann Cvetkovich. And me! My contribution is titled “Resonant Networks: On Affect and Social Media” and, well, asks how the concept of resonance may work in studies of social media. This is the intro/abstract:
In an era of clickbait journalism, Twitter storms, and viral social media campaigns varying from social protest to commodity promotion, it has become strikingly clear that networked communications are not merely about critical rational exchange or functional information retrieval, but equally – and perhaps even more explicitly – an issue of affective exchanges and connections of both the fleeting and more lasting kind. As argued in this chapter, the notion of affective resonance provides a means of accounting for encounters with the world in which bodies move from one state to another, and possibly become transformed in the process. This conceptualization is hardly specific to online phenomena as such, and it is used here to explore affective encounters between people, networks, interfaces, apps, devices, digital images, sounds, and texts in the context of social media. Moving from my own considerations of resonance in connection with online pornography to examinations of the role, both pronounced and not, that affect has played in Internet research, this chapter asks how affect matters and makes things matter in a contemporary media landscape driven by the quests for attention, viral circulation, and affective stickiness.
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, internet research, media studies
Ed
ited by Anne Graefer for Palgrave, Media and the Politics of Offence is very freshly out, and timely: “The contributors share a concern about the complex and ambiguous nature of offence as well as about the different ways in which this so-called ‘negative affect’ comes to matter in our everyday and socio-political lives. Through a series of instructive case studies of recent media provocations, the authors illustrate how being offended is more than an individual feeling and is, instead, closely tied to political structures and power relations.”
My own contribution is, predictably, on porn: “Pornographers are traditionally assumed to cause, rather than take to offence, yet porn video aggregator sites, production studios and individual professionals alike have recently engaged in protests against proposed work safety regulation, internet policy and legislative measures connected to sexual equality, especially so in the United States. In many instances, this has involved porn companies protecting their own financial interests whereas the economical rationale has remained less lucid in others. Focusing on moments of pornographers acting out in protest, this chapter examines the political economy of offence connected to contemporary pornography. More specifically, it explores how porn companies, and video aggregator sites in particular, make use of social media visibility to articulate their case, how their forms of protest function as PR, as well as how the shift of porn distribution to online platforms has changed the political stakes that all this involves.”
Filed under internet research, media studies, porn studies
Happy news from the Academy of Finland, which has granted Strategic research funding for our consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA, first research period 2019-2022). This is a collaboration between University of Turku (media studies, law, ICT), Tampere University (gender studies, media and communication), Åbo Akademi (law) and Aalto University (design), with a fabulous group of researchers, academic and societal board members, and collaborative stakeholders. As PI, I’m very excited. Here’s the summary:
IDA examines the tension between digitalization, data-driven media, and the possibilities for, and the rights to intimacy in contemporary Finland. As a range of activities from work practices to personal connections are increasingly organized through digital devices, applications, and services that both generate and leak data, considerations of intimacy need to extend to the infrastructural roles that digital technologies play in the functionality of private, social, occupational, and collective lives. It is further crucial to analyse how vulnerabilities connected to digitalization – from the difficulties of privacy management to sexual grooming, harassment, and abuse – impact people differently according to their age, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, and occupational status, and what tactics of resilience and protection they necessitate. And as public concerns on data breaches and third-party uses of personal data have grown increasingly manifest, it is necessary to also ask what ethical methodological possibilities are best suited, or can be developed, for understanding data traffic, user agency, consent, and rights.
Bringing together scholars from media and communication studies, computer science, law, design research, game studies, and gender studies, and combining qualitative inquiry with computational analysis, IDA produces new knowledge and public understanding on the impact of data-driven culture and develops ethical and socially sustainable data practices together with stakeholders ranging from public institutions to NGOs, civic and professional organizations. IDA brings scholars together with stakeholders and opinion leaders and therefore has a unique opportunity to generate high impact societal debate. It critically examines datafication within the current digital economy, asking how it is experienced, made sense of, and resisted, and what solutions remain available for developing socially sustainable data-driven culture.
The consortium first analyses the impact of data-driven culture on people’s different social roles and relations as citizens, immigrants, family members, parents, adolescents, caretakers, employees, entrepreneurs, friends, and sexual partners, the intimacies that these involve, and the vulnerabilities that this gives rise to. Second, the consortium inquires how intimacy functions as a contested resource in data-driven creative labour, public careers, and social connections. Third, IDA explores and develops democratic ways of managing, protecting, sharing, and using personal data, bringing considerations of intimacy together with those concerning privacy.
Coauthored with Ben Light & Kylie Jarrett, our article, The Dick Pic: Harassment, Curation and Desire is ever so freshly out with Social media + society, so on open access. It doubles as teaser for our book NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media, forthcoming from MIT Press in October. And here’s the abstract:
The combined rise of digital photography and social media has expanded what might be considered photo worthy. Among the pouting selfies and food stuffs of the day exists the ubiquitous dick pic. The mainstream media generally focuses on dick pics of the unsolicited kind, which, negatively positioned, are commonly associated with heterosexual harassment. Considering the ubiquity of dick pics across apps and platforms, research on the topic nevertheless remains scarce. In this article, we examine the dick pic as an online communicative form, first considering how it manifests the ability to harass and then moving beyond this dominant framing to analysis of contexts where such images are collated, expected, and sought after. Through this analysis of dick pics as figures and actors of harassment, curation, and desire, we demonstrate the simultaneous tenacity and flexibility of their meanings in connection with the dynamics of consent and non-consent, intimacy and distance, and complex circuits of desire. We further address the role of platforms, apps, and app stores, via their community standards and terms of use, in shaping the nature, and presence, of dick pics, and discuss the affective and communicative functions that these affordances serve (or fail to serve). Our analysis of three key modes of engagement with dick pics demonstrates the ambiguity and multiple valences of the phenomenon addressed.
Filed under internet research, media studies, porn studies, sexuality
Sooner than expected! Out in October, my Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play has already been reviewed, not once, but twice — apparently with more to follow. Voilà, Katherine Angel for Times Higher Education (behind paywall) and João Florêncio for Theory, Culture & Society. Always a thrill to be read.
Filed under affect theory, cultural studies, media studies, play, sexuality
Susanna Paasonen 