Category Archives: NSFW

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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November 3, 2020 · 8:03 pm

a Tumblr book

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!

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August 22, 2020 · 10:33 am

awarded!

Screen Shot 2019-04-16 at 21.11.43Our NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media, has just been chosen for the 2020 Association of Internet researchers’ Nancy Baym book award. Kylie Jarrett, Ben Light and I are deeply honored as the recognition means much coming from an association that we’ve all been involved with for a long time. This is what the jury had to say:

“NSFW is a wonderful, original and surprising book that deeply and critically interrogates issues around sex, porn, safety, and labor, be that the labor of producing online porn or keeping Facebook “safe”. The book weaves together its various threads (dick pics, algorithmically-produced art, misogynistic online harassment, and much more) to produce a compelling account of aspects of digital culture that – whether we like it or not – touch us all. Drawing on a variety of empirical materials and theoretical insights, NSFW is, in many ways, the consummate AoIR book: the very collaboration between Paasonen, Jarrett and Light was conceived at AoIR conferences, work in progress was presented at AoIR conferences, and the book is in constant dialogue with work produced by the AoIR community. Read more: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nsfw.”

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May 25, 2020 · 2:53 pm

books, books, books, forthcoming

9780367199111I’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.

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March 3, 2020 · 5:46 pm

Firenze

For March, I’m very happy to be visiting prof at University of Florence, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali. Should you be around, we have a NSFW workshop planned for the 20th, which can only be grand. Bienvenuti!

edit: Yes, I was very happy, but for obvious reasons things got cut short. We’re still hoping to arrange a workshop at another point.

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November 29, 2019 · 4:29 pm

the trouble with NSFW

Screen Shot 2019-04-16 at 21.11.43An interview on our new book and what the whole thing is about is freshly out in the MIT Press Reader. And this is the editors’ intro:

The hashtag #NSFW (not safe for work) acts as both a warning and an invitation. NSFW tells users, “We dare you to click on this link! And by the way, don’t do it until after work!” Unlike the specificity of movie and television advisories (“suggestive dialogue,” “sexual content”), NSFW signals, nonspecifically, sexually explicit content that ranges from nude selfies to pornography. But Susanna Paasonen, Kylie Jarrett, and Ben Light, the authors of “NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media,” argue that when applied across the board to all kinds of sexual images and formations, “the tag NSFW flattens crucial differences between them under the opaque blanket of offensiveness, riskiness, and unsafety that it connotes.” They maintain that if we are to envision social media ecologies capable of accommodating sexuality as a field of pleasure, communication, occupation, and world-making, it is crucial to resist categorical effacement of sexually suggestive and explicit content.

We asked Paasonen, Jarrett, and Light about how subjectivity and politics contribute to the nuances of what is designated “not safe for work,” how the hashtag reinforces our culture of heterosexism, and about its effects on the careers of sex workers across social media platforms.

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November 8, 2019 · 7:41 pm

excerpt from NSFW

Screen Shot 2019-04-16 at 21.11.43An excerpt from our new book with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light, NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media, is up at Literary Hub, just here. With the title, “What does ‘NSFW’ Mean in the Age of Social Media?”, it’s actually the first part of our chapter on dick pics and looks at the different roles that humor and gendered naked bodies play in the viral logics of social media.

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May 7, 2019 · 6:22 pm

sexual cultures programme is out!

Voilà, at https://blogit.utu.fi/sexualcultures/programme/, you can witness the excitement that the 3rd Sexual Cultures Conference: Play, May 28-29, is going to be. Should you miss out, urgent FOMO can be fought by hanging onto Twitter backchannels with #sexcult19, but that won’t be the same, really. So, see you in Turku!

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April 16, 2019 · 6:16 pm

NSFW has a cover!

Screen Shot 2019-04-16 at 21.11.43Forthcoming from MIT Press in October, NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media, co-authored with the fabulous Kylie Jarrett & Ben Light, now has a cover. And great it is; apparently it will be fluorescent! Here’s the book description:

An exploration of how and why social media content is tagged as “not safe for work” and an argument against conflating sexual content with risk.

The hashtag #NSFW (not safe for work) acts as both a warning and an invitation. NSFW tells users, “We dare you to click on this link! And by the way, don’t do it until after work!” Unlike the specificity of movie and television advisories (“suggestive dialogue,” “sexual content”), NSFW signals, nonspecifically, sexually explicit content that ranges from nude selfies to pornography. NSFW looks at how and why social media content is tagged “not safe” and shows how this serves to conflate sexual content and risk. The authors argue that the notion of “unsafety” extends beyond the risk of losing one’s job or being embarrassed at work to an unspecified sense of risk attached to sexually explicit media content and sexual communication in general. The authors examine NSFW practices of tagging and flagging on a range of social media platforms; online pornography and its dependence on technology; user-generated NSFW content—in particular, the dick pic and associated issues of consent, desire, agency, and social power; the deployment of risqué humor in the workplace; and sexist and misogynist online harassment that functions as an enforcer of inequalities. They argue against the categorical effacement of sexual content by means of an all-purpose hashtag and urge us to shift considerations of safety from pictorial properties to issues of context and consent.

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