Tag Archives: social media

Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan on their book, Digital Unsettling

Posted on by

0

Digital Unsettling

Interview by James Slotta

https://nyupress.org/9781479819157/digital-unsettling/

James Slotta: A couple of decades ago, paeans to the liberatory potential of the internet were common. Since then, the mood has darkened considerably as the capacity of digital media to buttress all manner of domination and inequality has become clear. In this book, you argue that there is truth to both digital optimist and digital pessimist perspectives—that, in fact, it is this Jekyll-and-Hyde quality of digital media that needs attending to. What led you to this ambivalent—unsettled—view of the digital and how does it shape your analysis of digital media?

Sahana Udupa: I have been researching political cultures of digital media and digitalization for about two decades now. It started with my ethnographic study on news cultures in early 2000s when print journalists had started to worry about the “specter of digital media” that haunted them. I explored these tensions in my first monograph, Making News in Global India, observing how digital networks were beginning to reshape the conditions of mediated political discourse. The expansion of interactive social media
amplified the momentum around digital networks as novel constellations for political participation. What form this would take remained an open question, but liberal technocratic ideology advocated especially by Silicon Valley pundits helped ramp up the euphoria around digital media as radical enablers of
civic participation. Although digitial social media have no doubt offered pathways to enter and alter political discursive fields for multiple publics, it became apparent in the later years that the democratizing force of digital media did not necessarily portend a progressive future.

My fieldwork took me to the darker sides of digital discourse and growing incidents of intimidation and abuse on social media. Ironically, abusive exchange had also opened up lines of political participation for a diverse range of actors who had been excluded or found themselves alienated from the serious tone of political deliberation and official centricity. The analytics of “gaali cultures” [gaali is an emic term for vitriol] developed in this work prompted me to collaborate for a global ethnographic inquiry around online extreme speech. Taking a closer look at this phenonmenon in the Digital Hate volume, I started to center decolonial perspectives in ways to emphasize ethnographic and historical sensibility and
to depart from technocentric and leader-centric analyses common in this field of research.

These efforts helped me to open the broader question around decoloniality
and the digital. In a 2020 e-seminar paper, I approached coloniality as a
global unfolding of the interrelated relations of the nation-state, race, and
market, arguing that coloniality continues to shape the macro-historical
structures within which proximate, affect-intensive battles of words are fought
online, often with grave political consequences. Collaborating with Gabriel
ignited more lines of inquiry around varied entanglements and ambivalences of
the digital in relation to decoloniality.  Unsettling for us functions as
a heuristic that helped us to probe the ambivalences but this not a sort of
balancing act. Far from it, it highlights the profound unevenness of the
digital condition. In my view, ambivalence does not just signal transcending an
either/or dyad. It is about the specific ways in which digital networks
entrench, rework and reinforce longstanding and novel forms of heirarchy while
co-creating multifarious conditions to challenge them. We have sought to
advance this approach in Digital Unsettling.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan:  I first started writing about digital media in 2011. I had recently begun following a group of emerging hip hop artists from socially and spatially marginalized locations in Delhi. As I watched them develop their aesthetic, creative, and playful audio-visual interventions online, I grew enamored with how these young men were taking up the participatory condition, to borrow a term or concept from one of the major and early proponents of the liberatory potential of the internet, Henry
Jenkins. It seemed, at first glance and from afar, that the otherwise deeply segregated, classed worlds of Delhi were opening up for them in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years prior, before the advent of 3G networks and flood of inexpensive smartphones in India.  It was only when I started doing on-the-ground fieldwork with various hip hop crews in Delhi that I saw the complicated ways that digital media at once opened new opportunities—social, economic, even political—for these young men even as it reinforced their racialized and classed positions in the city and country. In my first book, The Globally Familiar, I grappled with this contradiction.

From this on-the-ground experience (as well as other ethnographic and personal forays into the worlds of digital media in the last decade) I have developed an increasingly ambivalent position towards digital media and its circuits of flow. As Sahana rightly suggests, ambivalence is not an affective register that marks a transcendence from an either/or dyad. Rather, it is a disposition towards the relationships between online and offline words that locates the distance between what is performed and what is lived and that, crucially, engages with the political economies and histories that frame and engender (social) media production, circulation, and consumption. I approached writing Digital Unsettling with Sahana with this analytical stance.

James Slotta: Beyond analysis for analysis’s sake, the book is
deeply interested in the role of digital media in activist, decolonial
projects. What makes digital media particularly well suited to facilitate such
projects? What dangers lurk for these projects when they embrace the digital?

Gabriel and Sahana: In social movement contexts,
digital/social media enables a way to quickly and efficiently communicate
goals, set agendas, and coordinate action. Digital/social media also creates
opportunities to broadcast interventions and direct action—as we discuss in the
book—in ways that put pressure on institutional actors to change policy and/or
practice by generating public spectacle while creating the potential to spark
or invigorate action across borders.

The dangers to using social media/digital media in service of social movements –
particularly commercial, mainstream platforms – are multiple. Social movement
actors, once identified as such, are under constant surveillance and exposure
can lead to various forms of risk and, potentially, violence and harm.
Mainstream social media companies, as we have seen across national contexts,
have very little motivation to protect individuals (or collectives) given that
their platforms run at the discretion of state interests.

Another danger, of course, is the appropriation and commodification of social movement
symbols, methods, and intellectual projects. As we briefly discuss in the
introduction, decoloniality has suffered from its pop discursive success in
online circuits and academia in ways that have taken away from materially
grounded, historically rooted struggles where decoloniality has been developed
as a rigorous praxis.

Finally, creating online affinities towards addressing social issues doesn’t necessarily
translate into embodied forms of action. Often, liking a protest or commenting
on a movement agenda offers a way to feel like one is doing something while not
necessarily putting anything on the line.

James Slotta: The book moves across an impressive array of settings—from campus protests to content moderation to right-wing movements to your own online lives. Why did you decide to bring all of these different contexts together here? Is there something about digital media that compels such a multi-sited approach?

Gabriel and Sahana: There are three key factors, we think, that produced the montage of sites/settings/encounters in Digital Unsettling. First, each of us brought a different set of cultivated research relationships and inquiries to the table. Sahana has been working with content moderators and on right-wing movements for several years. Gabriel had been engaging with campus
movements and various, heterogenous online (creative) knowledge projects. As we
began to discuss the book we felt these different sites/relationships/encounters spoke to each other in important ways, ways that gave shape to the kind of unsettling that the digital has engendered in the
last decade.

The ethnographic method we developed to theorize these multiple unsettlings
works by placing events and spaces each of us have encountered in our
respective long term projects—similar to a timeline on a social media site—into
radical juxtaposition. Our reimagining of comparison as digital method puts
distinct locations in productive relation with each other in ways that hold the
potential to reveal the enduring structures that connect contexts.

As important was our decision to bring a reflexive, personal engagement to
the book. We were, in the tradition of feminist approaches to ethnography,
committed to creating a text that offered a rigorous view from somewhere, that
sincerely located each of us in the contexts we analyzed and in relation to one
and other.

Finally, the pandemic shaped our approach and writing. The majority of this
book was written in 2020 and 2021, when forced quarantines, lockdowns, and
rising death tolls seismically impacted the world. It seemed fitting and
appropriate that, as we watched this unfold on our respective social media
timelines, we took up a multi-sited approach to this project.

James Slotta: Throughout the book, you stress the need to decenter
the perspectives and experiences of white male elites when researching digital
technologies. What do we gain when we bring other perspectives to the center of
our analysis, such as those from the global South?

Sahana and Gabriel: The digital has touched the lives of
millions of people around the world, especially in the global South, and staying
close to how it unfolds in the lived worlds of diverse actors is an essential
approach to any grounded study. This is not just an empirical task but also an
epistemological challenge.

In the book, we emphasise that decentering hegemonic perspectives is a critical step
towards unsettling the conceits and deciepts of liberal thinking. One example
in our book comes from the Capture chapter. We begin the chapter by revisiting
the vastly popular Netflix production, “Social Dilemma.” The docudrama
highlighted how big tech firms have imbedded polarization as part of the
business model, driving democracies to the danger point where animosities are
hardwired into the business models of mega corporations rather than spilling
out as unintended effects.

While laudable for stirring public consciousness around the pitfalls of internet
communication—at least among its audiences—the film nonetheless diverted
attention from the diverse stakes of the political economy of digital
capitalism. At the outset, by reproducing the white, male, tech elite as the
central moral subject and eventual savior, it reinstated the terms of debate
within the European-Enlightenment racial paradigm of the reflexive interiority
of the white subject as the bearer of the authoritative view of the world and
concomitant curative capacity. By pinning the focus on well-meaning white guys
whose passionate creation has now transformed into Frankenstein’s creature
beyond the original intentions or control of its creators, the film, despite
its title, ironically had little to say about “the social”—the entangled
complex of histories, institutions, interests, and mediations—that compose the
actual grounds on which technology emerges and expands, in turn deepening and
disrupting the grounds that seed it.

Such an analytical turn opens up a range of questions that liberal elite moral
consciousness tends to obscure—vast global disparities in content moderation,
pronounced effects of extreme speech upon historically marginalized
communities, domination exerted within the nation state structure, and so on.
In other words, this analytical approach—what we call a decolonial
sensibility—helps us to recognize that digital data practices have not affected
everyone uniformly in a presumed post-political state of brute oppression.

James Slotta: This book is the result of what appears to be a close
collaboration between the two of you. I’m curious how the book would have
differed if each of you had written it by yourself. How did the collaborative
nature of this project shape the outcome?

Sahana and Gabriel: Perhaps the book would have tilted more
toward the darker side or the hopeful side, depending on who wrote it. What we
have accomplished together with a theory of unsettling has emerged from
continous exchange to nuance our own theoretical assumptions and conceptual
frames. As a result, we have been able to excavate the potential of digital
participation by tracing its vastly diverse and contradictory outcomes while
staying steadfast in highlighting the reality of (neo)colonial structures that
shape them.

Working together has also yielded a range of examples and experiences to think with. We
critically engage with the digital in this book as the two of us—each from our
distinct positions—have seen, heard, and felt the deep push for change and
reckoning with the past that has created our present and our visions for the
future, alongside the effects of political, economic, social, and
epistemological formations that continue to immiserate the racialized poor and
expropriate resources for the few.

 

April Reber take the page 99 test

Posted on by

0

Page 99 falls in chapter two of my dissertation. This chapter, “Moments of Disruption,” describes how members of the radical right group, Alternative for Germany (AfD), message a different view of Germany’s Nazi past to promote patriotism. Messaging refers to the crafted image political actors communicate through broad communicative methods such as video, clothing, gestures, and speech patterns (Lempert and Silverstein 2012).

In chapter two, I describe Germans’ changing perception of history, including German victimhood during World War II alongside narratives of the country’s aggression. AfD members participate in these changing narratives to disrupt how Germans think about Nazism. The two ethnographic examples in this chapter focus on how people across the political spectrum took part in AfD meetings to sonically and linguistically disrupt, silence, and articulate competing narratives about Germany’s past to gain control over its future.

Since page 99 is the last page of the conclusion, the “page 99” test is only slightly accurate. Page 99 is the final page of this chapter’s conclusion where I iterate my discussion of structural nostalgia (Herzfeld 2016). I understand structural nostalgia to be “a competition between hegemonic and counter narratives, images, and interpretations of Germany’s past and future which openly reveal the nation’s imperfections and through which, one can see Germans’ changing self-image” (Reber 2022: 99). Structural nostalgia is one way that AfD members message normalcy and democratic legitimacy. It creates a societal space in which members can draw on and substantiate already-existing normative notions in Germany.

In the broader dissertation, I examine how radical political actors messaged normalcy and democratic legitimacy to reframe their image through social media, in-person campaigning, and repurposed everyday materials and national symbols. These emergent radical politics, framed as “normal,” reveal schisms and skepticism about nation-building, liberal democracy, and national identity. The intellectual intervention I make is to examine ethnographically how radical political actors engage time-sensitive projects of normalcy and democratic legitimacy in structures that already support these actors. I build on contemporary scholarship that investigates how democratization is a process of exclusion (Partridge 2022), leading to already-partitioned democracies built on historically normative notions in each country. The social intervention I point to in this dissertation is that normalcy and democratic legitimacy, being unwieldly terms, can be and are manipulated by political actors to transform the future of communities and countries.

Lempert, Michael and Michael Silverstein. 2012. Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency. Bloomington:Indiana University Press.

Partridge, Damani. 2022. Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin. University of California Press.

Reber, April L. 2022. “The ‘Extremist’ Next Door: Normalcy and Democratic Legitimacy in Germany.” University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Robert W. Gehl and Sean T. Lawson on Social Engineering

Posted on by

0

Interview by Emma Briant

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/social-engineering

Emma Briant: Cambridge Analytica often pitched their methods as a contemporary digital marketing firm – if you were sat next to Alexander Nix at a dinner party, how would you convince him your book explains what’s really going on?

Robert W. Gehl: First of all, should we even trust that the dinner party is actually not a cover for some nefarious Nix scheme? Wasn’t Nix famous for such tricks? I’d be worried about what Nix is trying to convince me of! And given his duplicity – such as his claim to a German audience in 2017 that Cambridge Analytica got their data through legitimate means – is it even possible to convince him of anything?

Sean T. Lawson: I think I’d start by agreeing with the general premise: Cambridge Analytica was a contemporary digital marketing firm, not unlike many others. And therein lies the issue. The unique combination of big data, machine learning, and microtargeted messages that CA and so many others are adopting is an innovation, but one with potentially negative impacts.

Robert W. Gehl: Agreed. I think I would point to your work, Emma, among others –   whistleblowers such as Kaiser and Wylie, journalists such as Cadwalldr. Based on that work, we can say we already know what’s going on. What we need to do is further theorize it and look for points of pressure to fix the problems of manipulative communication. I think that’s the approach that all of us – you, us, people like Joan Donovan – are taking now.

Sean T. Lawson: I also don’t know that we’d claim that Social Engineeering accounts for the entirety of what’s “really going on.” What we’re doing is offering another way of thinking about what’s going on, one that we hope helps to connect the disparate contemporary pieces – like CA, but also Russian interference operations – with one another and with a broader, historical context.

Emma Briant: You post the question of how “crowdmasters, phreaks, hackers and trolls created” a new form of manipulative communication.  But how new is it really? You trace a long history, so what is new and distinct in what you see today?

Sean T. Lawson: Trying to sort out what is new and unique in the contemporary moment was one of our main goals for the book. As you note, many of the practices we see today have been part of public relations, propaganda, marketing, or hacking for a long time. Part of our frustration was that so much of the current discourse treats what’s happening with Cambridge Analytica or the Russians as unprecedented. It’s not. But it’s also not just “the same old thing,” either. So, we think what’s new here is, first, the unique combination of new methods of data gathering, analysis, and targeting that have the goal of allowing social engineers to have societal-level impacts by engaging people at the individual or small-group level. Second, we think the ability to shift fluidly and quickly between the interpersonal and mass forms of social engineering in a given campaign is also an innovation.

Robert W. Gehl: Right – that fusion of interpersonal con artistry techniques with mass societal engineering desires is what’s new. That’s what we mean by “masspersonal social engineering.” This concept is a subset of recent “masspersonal communication” theory that suggests that the old mass/interpersonal divide means far less in the digital age. When a tweet @ someone can also be a public performance in front of thousands, and when an interpersonal interaction could be recorded and posted online, it’s harder and harder to draw the line between interpersonal and mass communication. Likewise, it’s hard to draw the line between interpersonal con artistry and mass propaganda.

Emma Briant: Scholars use a lot of different terms to describe the practices your book aims to help us understand.  You avoid using the term contemporary propaganda or influence and instead discuss manipulative communication.  Can you explain your choices? 

Robert W. Gehl: We’re reacting somewhat to conceptual confusion happening right now. For example, Benkler, Faris, and Roberts’s excellent book Network Propagandadoes a fine job tracing how disinformation flows through right-wing media, but one thing they do is specifically bracket off interpersonal con artistry as not-propaganda. This makes sense due to the history of propaganda, but not as much sense when we start to think how manipulation might be both highly targeted at individuals at one moment, and then scaled up to a population level the next moment.

Sean T. Lawson: We chose “social engineering” over those other terms for a couple of reasons. First, we wanted one term to cover this combination of both the interpersonal and mass forms of manipulation that we were seeing come together. A few other scholars and security researchers had floated the term “social engineering,” which we thought was clever. But the more we talked about it, the more we became convinced that it wasn’t just a clever one-off but that there was really something to the use of that term that not only described both aspects of what we were seeing but did so in a new and interesting way. Second, we also felt like propaganda or influence did not fully account for the active and malicious manipulation of what we were trying to describe. Propaganda, to us, implies spreading biased information promoting one’s own side. Influence, though it can be malicious, is ubiquitous and mostly innocuous. We think that social engineering better captures the active attempt at using communication to manipulate a target in a malicious way.

Robert W. Gehl: As for other terms, etymologically, “influence” comes from astrology, meaning a fluid coming from the stars that shapes our lives. I personally prefer “manipulation” – coming from the late Latin manipulare, leading by the hand. I think of it as a more human-centric and less metaphysical capacity to shape environments. This links up well with “social engineering” – engineering comes from gin, a trap, net, or snare (including verbal traps and snares) and reflects the desire to practically apply knowledge to shape a situation.

Emma Briant: Your approach bringing together histories of hacking and deception is truly original.  Was there a Eureka moment when you felt this idea coming together? Can you explain how the idea emerged from each of your work and unique perspectives coming together?

Sean T. Lawson: At the time, both of us were working together at the University of Utah and talked about our respective projects regularly. Rob had just published a book about the dark web and was well into a new project originally just focused on the history of hacker social engineering. I was just finishing up a book on cybersecurity discourse in the United States. At the end of that book, I argued that political warfare, propaganda, and disinformation were more the reality of cyber conflict than the as-yet hypothetical “cyber Pearl Harbor” infrastructure attacks that get so much attention. But the attempt at precise targeting and en masse seemed new and my initial efforts to explain it using analogies to the so-called “precision revolution” and airpower in the U.S. military felt unsatisfactory.

Robert W. Gehl: For me, I have long been intrigued by the concept of engineering – as I mentioned above, it contains the term gin (snare, trap). I was initially thinking of looking at the genealogy of software engineering – I had been collecting material on that since my first book. But in the course of writing Weaving the Dark Web, I came across people talking in hacker forums about “social engineering” and was hooked. I thought of social engineering to be a pejorative term for government programs, not as a fancy way of saying con artistry. So I dug into hacker social engineering. My initial plan was to write about hacker social engineering only, but in conversations with Sean, he convinced me that the more important move would be to trace both the older social engineering of the early 20th century with the hacker conception. In turn, I convinced him to join the project and bring his cyberwar discourse expertise to bear on it.

Sean T. Lawson: So, really through ongoing discussion of our respective projects at the time, we came to realize that there was overlap between hacking and propaganda techniques. As we looked around, we didn’t see anyone else taking that approach, so we decided to see what would happen if we did. We think that the result is a valuable new way of thinking about the relationships between these practices.

Emma Briant: How optimistic are you about our future in this age of masspersonal social engineering? Can we escape its grasp long enough to hack the system and build something better?

Robert W. Gehl: I love this question, because my current research addresses it head-on. I’ve been a longstanding advocate of quitting corporate social media, since its whole purpose is to have us produce ourselves as consumers through profiling and then deliver our profiled selves to advertisers. Facebook/Meta makes for a fine vehicle for masspersonal social engineering! But instead of advocating quitting social media – since it does give people a great deal of pleasure – I’ve been studying ethical alternatives, like Mastodon. If we’re looking for people who are hacking the system, look to the people coding Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse. You’ll note rather quickly that targeted advertising is not part of that system! And that helps make is less attractive to the sort of manipulations we’re talking about.

Sean T. Lawson: We can hack the system to make something better. We talk about options for that at the end of the book. However, I’m not optimistic that we will. That is what is so frustrating about this situation. Sensible privacy and data collection regulations would go a long way to thwarting the use of big data in masspersonal social engineering. Addressing the problem of dark money and front groups in politics is also essential. Doing more to shore up our cybersecurity to make the penetration and theft of information that can subsequently be weaponized is also possible and essential. Unfortunately, at the moment, we’re not seeing nearly enough progress in each of these areas. Too many actors, from corporations to social media platforms to marketing firms to politicians who rely on them have an interest in continuing to allow masspersonal social engineering to take place.

Robert W. Gehl: We joke that Sean is Eeyore. But I am afraid he’s right. I’m looking at home-grown, ethical FOSS solutions but they are not going to do the job on their own. Global regulations of what you, Emma, aptly call the “influence industry” have to happen.

Jacqueline Hazen takes the page 99 test

Posted on by

0


The 99th page of my dissertation, “Mediating Micronesian Futures: Potentialities and Precarity in Cultural Production Among Mobile Pacific Islanders,” marks a transition in a chapter introducing how contemporary
people from the Federated States of Micronesia engage diverse media to connect on their home
islands and further afield. The chapter’s first sections follow a ritual sound from the island of
Pohnpei, FSM as it is deployed by Pohnpeians to continue its mediating work of gathering
participants in feast houses, but also to communicate respect during Pohnpeian radio broadcasts
and to engage diverse crowds at international events on Pohnpei and abroad. Page 99 moves
from tracing this enduring Pohnpeian mediator to broadly introducing other indigenous and
incorporated technologies in Micronesians’ media worlds. Faye Ginsburg, Brian Larkin, and Lila
Abu Lughod argue that analyzing ‘media worlds’ “situates media as a social practice within…
shifting political and cultural frames,” (2002: 3). The media worlds shaped by contemporary
Micronesians span islands in the Federated States of Micronesia and places in Guam, Hawai‘i,
and the continental United States where an estimated 1 in 3 FSM citizens and their diaspora-born
children travel, work, and live as legal non-immigrants. These transnational Micronesian media
worlds enlarge the scale of the transmission and transformations of cultural knowledge and
protocol, as well as valued materials. As articulated by Epeli Hau‘ofa, the contemporary
circulation of Pacific people, valued Oceanic foods and substances, and Western materials within
the Pacific and beyond move through long-held cultural patterns of families’ reciprocal
interdependence, but now between kin at home, in motion, and in diaspora (1993; see also Peter
2000; Gershon 2007, 2012).
People on Pohnpei and among the FSM diaspora on Guam narrated how they deploy
multiple communicative modalities in their work to maintain expected kinship roles from
a distance. This section presents types of modalities deployed across contemporary
Micronesians’ networks intertwined with my interlocutors’ narratives about
communication devices’ and media platforms’ roles in facilitating valued socioeconomic
exchanges that underlie practices of interdependent care and support among kin (Hau‘ofa
2008.) Further narratives describe negotiations around connectivity and respect in
communication across social media platforms, and diverse media modalities’
incorporation in processes of documenting and transmitting culturally-significant
knowledge, forms, and performances.

Page 99 then describes hand carried letters and packages on planes, and subsequent pages
discuss Micronesians’ narratives about culturally-inflected engagement with high-frequency, CB,
and satellite radios; families’ communal mobile phones; WhatsApp and Facebook; film and
digital photography; as well as camcorders and cell phone films.

I conducted my dissertation fieldwork with islanders on Pohnpei and with FSM diaspora on
Guam, indigenous home of the Chamoru and an unincorporated U.S. territory, during periods
from 2015 to 2018. Re-reading this page in 2021 — and later chapters about Pohnpeians’
digitized participation in mortuary and other rituals from afar — underscores how highly
diasporic populations have been shaping ways to participate in their families’ life events through
mediating technologies long before many governments’ social distancing mandates in 2020
widely necessitated digitally-mediated gatherings for celebrations and mourning in order to quell
the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Jacqueline Hazen. 2020. “Mediating Micronesian Futures: Potentialities and Precarity in Cultural Production Among Mobile Pacific Islanders.” New York University Phd.

Beata Jungselius takes the Page 99 test

Posted on by

0

My page 99 is found within the chapter ”Summary of findings and contribution of thesis”
of my thesis ”Using social media” in which I explore social media use (especially social
photography) in a permanently online, permanently connected world (Vorderer et al.,
2017). The aim of my thesis is to describe what constitutes social media use in a world of
smartphones with cameras, why and how social media use is meaningful as a category of
activity, and to contribute with new insights on how social media skills and perceptions
change as practices and platforms develop. Conveniently, the very first sentence leads us
right into one of my main findings:

”activities ranging from active involvement with producing content as well as managing relationships and time, to more passive ways of planning and monitoring social media activities.”

This sentence concerns different levels of engagement in social media use and the need to acknowledge a broader variety of activities when aiming to conceptualize social media use.   People engage in social media use with different levels of engagement. When using social media, people negotiate between multiple kinds of use and activities. Social media users both passively consume content in social media, but they engage in
production and management of their content as well. Apart from editing pictures, writing tweets and posting stories, they plan their activities, they monitor the activities of others and they orient towards social media, even when not actively involved with their phones.

This kind of negotiating and interplay between the many elements and socially regulated practices sheds light on the complexity of social media use. Page 99 in my thesis mainly refers to one of the papers included in my thesis, ”Same same but different. Changes in social media practices over time” (2019). In this paper, my colleague and I present examples of social media use on different levels of engagement and describe how
numerous aspects, such as lifestyle, disposable time and technical capabilities shape social media use. By comparing data from interviews conducted with the same informants in 2012 as in 2017, we were able to show how social media use has changed over time.

Users are involved in a number of practices when using social media. However, the levels of involvement vary and therefor, there is no consensus on what constitutes social media use. Because of this, I argue that it is problematic to measure social media use in terms of time spent online, simply because it is difficult, both for users as well as researchers, to describe what social media use is. However, as pointed out in the final sentence of the page, I am neither arguing for equating using social media with simply being online:

”Although arguing for a widening of the definition of social media use, we suggest that care be taken not to widen the definition too much, as in equating social media use with “being online.”  Social media use still relies upon specific practices, and we argue that both those practices that are more active and those that are more passive, need more attention within the social media studies field.”

Rather, based on my findings, I suggest that social media use is: ”to engage in social practices such as planning, monitoring, producing, consuming, sharing and interacting around content. It is to make use of affordances to produce, share and interact in social media, to engage in a community of practice, to be familiar with idioms of practice, and to act according to the social rules that regulate those practices. Social media consists of users, shaping the platform vernacular and the idioms of practice within their communities of practice. These evolve over time; they are not static. Social media use is shaped both by design and technical capabilities as well as by the social practices
that users engage in. Habits, aesthetic preferences and social concerns are as involved in shaping the use of a social technology as technical capabilities are.” (Jungselius, 2019)

References:
Jungselius, B. (2019). Using social media. Doctoral dissertation. Department of Applied IT.
University of Gothenburg. Thesis defended October 25th, 2019. Opponent: Professor
Richard Seyler Ling.

Jungselius, B., Weilenmann, A. (2019). Same Same But Different. Changes in Social Media
Practices Over Time. Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Social Media and
Society (SMSociety ’19) Toronto, Canada: ACM Press.

Vorderer, P., Krömer, N., & Schneider, F. M. (2016). Permanently online, permanently
connected: Explorations into university students’ use of social media and mobile smart
devices. Computers in Human Behavior, 63(October), 694–703. https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.chb.2016.05.085

Ulla Berg on her new book, Mobile Selves

Posted on by

2

Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (Social Transformations in American Anthropology) by [Berg, Ulla D.]

https://nyupress.org/books/9781479803460/

Interview by Ilana Gershon

 If you were in a long customs line, like the one in the complex and evocative vignette with which you open your book, and you struck up a conversation with an immigration lawyer who happened to be just ahead of you in line, how would you describe your book?

Any migrant almost always exceeds the legal category they inhabit for US immigration purposes and this “excess” is a central concern in my book. I would probably focus on describing the communicative practices that people in my study use to navigate and fit into the legal categories available to them, including various visa categories. Lawyers are of course extremely aware of the complexities of people’s experiences when they try to construct a client’s case as compelling for any type of relief, but they also for obvious reasons need to shy away from engaging how people’s communicative practices are performative and context-dependent.

Migration is both a social and signifying practice that link the individual to the social collectivity. In contexts of migration, the migrant body is the center of these processes of signification; it is that which is read by others—for example, immigration officers, Anglo-Americans and non-migrant relatives—and that which in the most fundamental sense mediates all action upon the world. In the book at large, I discuss how the larger constraints of the migration process—and of social and racial orders more generally—constantly prompts migrants to communicate to others— U.S. immigration officials, Peruvian government officials, elite Peruvians, people in their home towns, US employers, and wider publics—an image of who they are or are expected to be and how they wish to be seen. Such images are necessarily always partial; indeed, they deny any facile claims to legibility embedded in normative and ideal-typical representations of who is a “Peruvian,” an “immigrant,” a “non-citizen,” a “refugee,” and so on. This is where the anthropological perspective is different from the legal one and could produce interesting debates!

How have biometric technologies changed people’s experiences of traveling between Peru and the United States?

Before the implementation of biometric passports and screening systems at USCIS checkpoints, it was still relatively easy for someone from Latin America to travel on someone else’s passport. In Mobile Selves, I give the example of two brothers who used the same passport to enter the US sometime in the 1990s. One of them told me: “We look like each other…and they [that is, the immigration authorities] can’t tell the difference anyway. To the gringos all cholos look the same.” But in the biometric era, not all cholos “read” the same!

Biometric technologies transform the body’s surfaces and characteristics into digital codes to be ‘read’ by a machine. But the meaning of the biometric body is always contingent upon the social and racial contexts in which it will be read and how it is tied to identity from the perspective of the social and political institutions that control the international movement of people. But of course, as many critics of biometrics have also argued, the burden of surveillance will continue to fall disproportionately on poor, marginal, and racialized communities. That is one of the problems with biometrics.

The heavier reliance on biometric identification also puts more weight on the visa interview and less on a portfolio of supporting documents. An average visa interview at the US consulate in Lima now lasts 3-5 minutes, and this opens up for all sorts of questions about the arbitrariness and the social and racial logics by which visa decisions are made, including about the issuing officer’s assumption about some people’s worthiness of a US visa over others. I think biometric technologies have intensified many people’s experience of being subjected to a controlling racial regime.

You describe how the experience of transnational migration has changed for people because of all the possible media people can now use to connect with family members back home.  Yet just because these technologies exist doesn’t mean that it is socially possible for Peruvian migrants to use them.   I was wondering if you could say a little bit about some of the social complications surrounding these technologies that make using these technologies a challenge both for those in Peru and those in the United States.

It is often assumed that just because communication technology exists, it will automatically make us feel more connected to our loved ones across time and space. But the expectation that you have to be reachable and connected at any point in time can be both exhausting, impractical, and also undesirable – we all know this from our daily lives! Such expectations were often difficult to meet both for labor migrants abroad as well as for family members in Peru, because of complicated work schedules, long workdays, little free time at their disposal, controlling employers or workplace surveillance, or limited options to connect in rural areas in Peru.

This is the main issue with celebratory accounts of the affordances that new media environments are supposed to offer for the enactment and experience of social relations across time and space. Yes, disenfranchised migrant mothers can use Skype or Facetime to check in on their children from afar, but this technologically mediated form of communication cannot substitute the intense multi-sensorial experience of being able to tug your own kid (not someone else’s) into bed at night or to be there for them if they wake up in the middle of the night after a nightmare or if something bad happens at school.

Considering these complex social dynamics undergirded by global inequality, I disagree with scholars who diminish or even disregard the social and emotional cost of separation by proposing that polymedia environments contribute to making the absent other tangible and therefore come to constitute the other person and hence the relationship itself. For most people in my study, new technologies could alter feelings by momentarily collapsing distance and institute forms of co-presence, but at the end of the day most migrant mothers lived on in the United States mourning the prolonged separation from their children and other relatives. Along with this, the feelings of abandonment in some children towards their migrant parents extend into their adolescence and adulthood as resentments that cannot easily be undone even as a person grows up and acquires more tools to understand your parent’s actions.  Feelings such as pain, loss, suffering over separation and distance, longing, sadness, and nostalgia or the more positive ones such as love, compassion, intimacy, and belonging continued to animate the lives of migrants in affective and material ways despite the changing technologies used to produce these social and intersubjective relationships through long-distance communication.

I was wondering if you could discuss the different attitudes Peruvian migrants have towards audio-cassettes and videocassettes, and how these different media ideologies shaped the genres people use to circulate images and stories circulated between Peru and the U.S.

Absolutely. Most recent migrants are constantly preoccupied with maintaining the social bonds of kinship with family and relatives left behind via long-distance communication, remitting small amounts of money from their meager entry-level U.S. salaries, and by circulating a variety of material and media objects. In this way, they seek to remain emotionally connected and relevant in the everyday lives of their families in Peru and socially visible in the communities they left behind. For example, in Chapter 3, I evoke the concept of “remote sensing” specifically to discuss the attempts of migrant parents to “feel” and “know” their children’s lives and whereabouts from afar. This communicative, sensory, and mediated practice, which employ both aural and visual technologies, regularly plays out against dominant social norms that cast “communicative” migrants abroad in a favorable light back home as caring mothers, responsible fathers, dutiful daughters, and reliable and dependable “hijos ausentes” (that is, absent sons and daughters of their rural communities of origin). But in the context of the prolonged separation caused by migration, “remote sensing”, I suggest, amplifies rather than ameliorates the social and emotional struggles of transnational families, because participants are often not able to perform according to the roles set for them by gendered and intergenerational normative frameworks. In this way, long-distance communication, as a form of social, cultural, and affective practice, is often fraught with tension, uncertainty, and power inequalities.

Some migrants in my study preferred visual means of communication and they claimed it gave them the added effect of seeing their loved ones. There was often an assumption that you can “fake it” over the phone but you cannot conceal your true feelings when video chatting (even if all forms of communication are of course performative – also face-to-face communication whether mediated by video or not). Many migrants also “produced” videos to send to their family members – either of everyday life or special occasions such as community events or fiestas. I show in the book how video production, consumption, and circulation figure centrally in migrants’ staging of their own social visibility as “worldly” and “cosmopolitan” ex-campesinos. Participants in my study were highly invested in monitoring, selecting, and negotiating the criteria for which images of migrant life abroad could be shared with those back in Peru and what, in turn, had to be made invisible and left out of circulation to avoid rumors, tensions, and accusations within transnational families or among paisanos back home. Of course sometimes particular image objects escaped intended networks of circulation and moved beyond specific audiences. In these cases, imagery served as “visual evidence” that could complicate people’s efforts of self-fashioning. I show how such revelations have implications for the production of social cohesion within transnational migrant collectivities, and how circulating images may serve as new forms of social control and surveillance. In sum, visual and oral forms of communication have significant differences but both extend and also complicate social relations and in their own way expose the inherent tensions and ambiguities of the migrant/transnational condition of Andean Peruvians.

You published this book before Trump was elected, turning anti-immigration sentiment into an official government position. If you had a chance to talk to a room full of Trump supporters who were willing to listening respectfully to academics, what would you like them to know about your research?

Ha ha—fact-seeking Trump supporters? That seems like a hypothetical scenario at this point in time, but ok… I would probably feel compelled to first talk about the many contributions of immigrants—Latin Americans, in particular—to the US economy and society and to expel some of the many “alternative facts” about these populations circulated by the Trump administration’s propaganda machinery.

What currently counts as “immigration policy” in the US is a series of contradictory piecemeal actions, most of them based on long-lived racial anxieties and nativist ideologies, which do not add up to any coherent policy. Unfortunately, by not having a coherent immigration policy, the US has become a world leader in the undermining of human potential. Trump’s recent decision to end DACA is a text-book example of such complete lack of perspective.

I would give examples of the profound existential resourcefulness of most of the mobile Peruvians I came to know during my research to show Trump supporters how the drive to better oneself and the larger community is not a US invention but one that is widely shared by migrants around the world; one that cannot but make America much greater in the future than what it currently is today. Immigrants don’t take jobs, they create them. We are not parasitical on the US economy; we make this economy happen on a daily basis.

Hopefully, the Trump era will soon be reduced to a crazy minor parenthesis in modern US history, but what not only a room full of attentive Trump supporters specifically, but US whites more generally must acknowledge and work to change is how in the United States mobility is intimately tied to race and privilege (or the lack thereof). This is one of the basic points of the book that I would attempt to convey in such a situation.

Jordan Kraemer’s Mobile Berlin

Posted on by

0

“It was only during the springtime seasonal harvest of white asparagus (Spargel) that the connection became more apparent between regional, eastern, and national German identities.”

In my work on the growing popularity of social and mobile media among urban, middle class Europeans in Berlin (Penn Press, forthcoming), it might seem ironic that page 99 of the dissertation treats not media or digital technology or even transnational connection, but Spargelzeit, the springtime season of white asparagus, beloved by many in Germany and northern Europe. The chapter connects (or attempts to connect) weekly shared Spargel meals among a circle of friends from eastern Germany living in Berlin to ways of being and feeling German affectively, and links affective forms of selfhood to the territorial scale of the nation. National affect, in this sense, rather than discursive identification, offers insight into a surprising finding about media practices, that some young Germans and other Europeans oriented toward transnational connections on social media read national newspapers as part of their daily online routine, after checking email and Facebook.

Yet from another angle, page 99 encapsulates the central themes wending through the manuscript, reconsidering media and place in terms of scalemaking, that is, how the local, national, or global are constructed as geographic levels through media practice. Through this approach, I argue that national selfhood is better understood not as a shift in geographic scope, from regional or provincial identities to national (or post-national) ones, but in the nature of selfhood itself, in which subjectivity became linked to the territorial order of the nation-state:

“In Berlin, eating Spargel together linked regional Saxony-Anhalt and eastern German identities to ways of being and feeling German with consequences for how belonging at the national scale was experienced and understood, online and offline.”

This fractal-like embedding of the broader analytic in a single page (while perhaps typical of a book-length project) calls to mind Joe Dumit’s “Implosion Project” exercise (Dumit 2014). Take any object, or idea or topic, and unpack all the dense connections, histories, and associations that you know about it (and don’t know), and you find, to paraphrase, how the world is in it and it’s in the world. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that an ethnographic moment seemingly unrelated to my broader questions is in fact closely entwined with them.

Joseph Dumit. 2014. “Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time.” Cultural Anthropology 29(2): 344–362. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.09

https://culanth.org/articles/741-writing-the-implosion-teaching-the-world-one

 

Jordan Kraemer. 2012. “Mobile Berlin: Social Media and the New Europe.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine.

Jordan Kraemer, PhD, is a media anthropologist who writes about emerging media, transnationalism, design, mobility, and precarity. She is currently completing a book on social and mobile media, urban space, and cosmopolitanism in Berlin. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and is teaching STS at NYU Tandon and consulting with Implosion Labs, LLC in Brooklyn. You can reach her at jordanhkraemer@gmail.com.

Ted Cruz Is the Zodiac Killer: A Contemporary Legend on Twitter

Posted on by

1

by Kristiana Willsey There’s a story circulating online that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. More accurately, there’s a story that there’s a story Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer—the twitter-originated conspiracy theory isn’t attached to a clear canonical narrative, … Continue reading →