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M/C journal: ‘beginnings’ issue
The ‘beginnings’ issue of the M/C Journal, edited by Bjorn Nansen (University of Melbourne) and me, has just been published. We’re really pleased with how this issue has turned out: a number of articles engage with the beginnings of life — from pregnancy apps to social media microcelebrity infants to infant media use – but there are also some fantastically creative engagements, from the beginnings of spreadsheets in terms of both history and practice through to the rhetoric beginnings of new technologies such as smart contact lenses. As with all issues of M/C, the content is free and open access.
Here’s the issue contents:
- EDITORIAL: Beginnings – Bjorn Nansen, Tama Leaver
- Playing Pregnancy: The Ludification and Gamification of Expectant Motherhood in Smartphone Apps – Deborah Lupton, Gareth M Thomas
- ‘Getting Personal’: Contemplating Changes in Intersubjectivity, Methodology and Ethnography – Sophia Alice Johnson
- Micromicrocelebrity: Branding Babies on the Internet – Crystal Abidin
- Digitods: Toddlers, Touch Screens and Australian Family Life – Donell Joy Holloway, Lelia Green, Kylie Stevenson
- Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques – Bjorn Nansen
- Extra-Planetary Digital Cultures – David Crouch, Katarina Damjanov
- Startling Starts: Smart Contact Lenses and Technogenesis – Isabel Pedersen, Kirsten Ellison
[Image: 4/366: Beginning by Magic Madzik CC BY]
2015 publications & TALKS UPDATE
As I’ve been neglecting the blog, a quick update on new publications so far this year:
- My invited paper ‘Researching the Ends of Identity: Birth and Death on Social Media‘ appears in the inaugural issue of Social Media + Society. The first issue contains more than 50 manifesto pieces from leading social media (and related) researchers from around the globe examining the future(s) of social media research, and well worth looking over for anyone working anywhere near the field. I’m also genuinely delighted to have joined the journal’s editorial board.
- Michele Willson and I have an article ‘Zynga’s FarmVille, social games, and the ethics of big data mining‘ in the second issue of Communication Research and Practice, the new ANZCA journal. I’m also pleased to have joined the journal’s Editorial Advisory Group, helping steer and focus the journal for its first few years. (The article is paywalled, but an open access pre-print is available, too.)
- Also, in a totally different area, my chapter ‘Radically Performing the Borg? Gender Identity and Narratology in Star Trek’ revisits work I did more than a decade ago, and appears in the new collection The Star Trek Universe: Franchising the Final Frontier.
Amongst several recent talks, I gave a presentation for Curtin Alumni at a public event in July. The talk was recorded and is now available on YouTube or embedded below. It gives a fairly decent overview of my Ends of Identity project for anyone interested.
A Methodology for Mapping Instagram Hashtags
Today First Monday published A Methodology for Mapping Instagram Hashtags by Tim Highfield and myself. This methodology paper explains the processes behind the various media we’ve been tracking as part of the Ends of Identity project, although the utility of the methods go far beyond that. Beyond technical questions, we’ve included some important ethical and privacy questions that arose as we started to explore Instagram mapping. Here’s the abstract:
While social media research has provided detailed cumulative analyses of selected social media platforms and content, especially Twitter, newer platforms, apps, and visual content have been less extensively studied so far. This paper proposes a methodology for studying Instagram activity, building on established methods for Twitter research by initially examining hashtags, as common structural features to both platforms. In doing so, we outline methodological challenges to studying Instagram, especially in comparison to Twitter. Finally, we address critical questions around ethics and privacy for social media users and researchers alike, setting out key considerations for future social media research.
The full paper is available at First Monday, fully open access, with a Creative Commons license. As always, your comments, thoughts and feedback are welcome here, or on Twitter.
Captured at Birth? Presence, Privacy and Intimate Surveillance
Yesterday, as part of the fantastic ‘Presence, Privacy and Pseudonymity ‘panel at Internet Research 15: Boundaries and Intersections in Daegu, South Korea, I presented an expanded and revised version of the paper first gave in Dunedin earlier this year. The paper has been retitled slightly as ‘Captured at Birth? Presence, Privacy and Intimate Surveillance’; the slides are available now:
If you’re interested, Axel Bruns did a great liveblog summary of the paper, and for the truly dedicated there is an mp3 audio copy of the talk. The paper itself is in the process of being written up and should be in full chapter form in a month or so; if you’d like to look over a full draft once it’s written up, just let me know.
CFP: ‘Beginnings’
Bjorn Nansen and I are editing an issue of M/C A Journal of Media and Culture on the (deliberately and we hope, provocatively) broad topic of ‘Beginnings’. The Call for Papers has just been released, and is reproduced below for your convenience:
‘beginnings’
The digital spaces we encounter are increasingly stabilised and structured, organised through regulatory and commercial regimes, and populated by content and users whose lives began already networked in digital forms of production, distribution and consumption. This issue of M/C Journal seeks to explore the beginnings of these familiar and well-established, as well as emerging, contexts of digital cultures. By focussing on the beginnings, of life, of platforms, of technological encounters, of existence on social media, and so on, this issue aims to bring together scholarship around the infant and initial moments of technology use, and the processes, relations and forces that shape and are shaped by these beginnings. As digital culture becomes increasingly banal and thus less visible, studying digital beginnings may help to illuminate the varied forms of meaning, mediation, and materiality at play in configuring the familiar. Exploring beginnings may also serve to highlight paths not taken, as well as potential alternatives produced at such interstices.
Questions of beginnings feature within research traditions and theories of technology adoption, domestication and development, and so can be understood in reference to individuals and users, but also apply to the beginnings of social groups and movements, or the birth of applications, platforms, technologies or enterprises. Studying beginnings, therefore, raises questions about digital histories, trajectories and temporalities, and is open to empirical, methodological or theoretical enquiries.
By inviting contributions interested in exploring digital beginnings in this issue of M/C, possible topics to be addressed may include, but are not limited to:
- The mediation of the unborn and newly born
- New parents and social media platforms
- Case studies or examples of infant media use
- Newbs and noobs in gaming or online communities
- The cultural implications of new forms of computational interfaces (e.g. the Internet of Things)
- Myths of new beginnings and technological exceptionalism (e.g. 3D printing)
- Early historical perspectives on digital media industries or events
- Start-up spaces or cultures
- Alternate beginnings (eg failed and forgotten inventions)
Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).
Details
- Article deadline: 14 Aug. 2015
- Release date: 14 Oct. 2015
- Editors: Bjorn Nansen and Tama Leaver
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to beginnings@journal.media-culture.org.au.
Needless to say, enquiries are welcome, and early submissions, too!
[Image: 4/366: Beginning by Magic Madzik CC BY]
Mapping the Ends of Identity on Instagram
At last week’s Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) conference at Swinburne University in Melbourne I gave a new paper by myself and Tim Highfield entitled ‘Mapping the Ends of Identity on Instagram’. The slides, abstract, and audio recording of the talk are below:
While many studies explore the way that individuals represent themselves online, a less studied but equally important question is the way that individuals who cannot represent themselves are portrayed. This paper outlines an investigation into some of those individuals, exploring the ends of identity – birth and death – and the way the very young and deceased are portrayed via the popular mobile photo sharing app and platform Instagram. In order to explore visual representations of birth and death on Instagram, photos with four specific tags were tracked: #birth, #ultrasound, #funeral and #RIP. The data gathered included quantitative and qualitative material. On the quantitative front, metadata was aggregated about each photo posted for three months using the four target tags. This includes metadata such as the date taken, place taken, number of likes, number of comments, what tags were used, and what descriptions were given to the photographs. The quantitative data gives also gives an overall picture of the frequency and volume of the tags used. To give a more detailed understanding of the photos themselves, on one day of each month tracked, all of the photographs on Instagram using the four tags were downloaded and coded, giving a much clearer representative sampling of exactly how each tag is used, the sort of photos shared, and allowed a level of filtering. For example, the #ultrasound hashtag includes a range of images, not just prenatal ultrasounds, including both current images (taken and shared at that moment), historical images, collages, and even ultrasound humour (for example, prenatal ultrasound images with including a photoshopped inclusion of a cash, or a cigarette, joking about the what the future might hold). This paper will outline the methods developed for tracking Instagram photos via tags, it will then present a quantitative overview of the uses and frequency of the four hashtags tracked, give a qualitative overview of the #ultrasound and #RIP tags, and conclude with some general extrapolations about the way that birth and death are visually represented online in the era of mobile media.
And the audio recording of the talk is available on Soundcloud for those who are willing to brave the mediocre quality and variable volume (because I can’t talk without pacing about, it seems!).
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