social media – Page 3

Call for presentations and artworks

Affect and Social Media#3

experience

engagement

entanglement

Including the Sensorium Art Show (the sequel)

Event Date: Thurs 25th May, 2017

Venue: University of East London, Docklands Campus

Confirmed keynote: Prof Jessica Ringrose (UCL)

https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=JLRIN58

Call for 15min presentations and artworks

The organizers of A&SM#3 welcome proposals for 15min presentations and artworks that interpret and explore the affective, feely and emotional encounters with social media grasped through the following themes:

Experience
Engagement
Entanglement

Presentations and artworks can widely interpret each theme, but preference will be given to proposals that respond in two ways.

Firstly, the organizers are particularly interested in creative responses (academic and artistic) to recent social media events – the US election, for example. So proposals might address how the Trump win allows us to develop a fresh understanding of shared experiences, emotional engagements or new entanglements with social media.

Secondly, we ask presenters and artists to consider how their approach to affect and social media can be put to work in an education context. For example, how can the potential of affect theory reach out across teaching practices and develop novel understandings of the political nature and transformative possibilities of teaching.

The academic part of this call is open to experienced scholars, new researchers and postgrad students from across the disciplinary boundaries of affect studies and related areas of study interested in theorizing and working with emotion and feelings in a social media context. We welcome a good mixture of innovative conceptual and methodological approaches.

The Sensorium Art Exhibit will interweave the conference proceedings and bring it to a close with a special show, alongside free drinks and nibbles.

15min presentations and artwork proposals to: t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk

Please include 200 word max description and short bio including academic affiliation and relevant links to previous work and/or website profile.

DEADLINE: Tues 28th Feb 2017.

Full registration details will be made available from 27th Jan via UEL event page.

https://www.uel.ac.uk/Events/2017/05/Affect-and-Social-Media-3

10 January, 2017

Spacing social media – seminar at Swansea (18th Jan)

I am participating in the geography seminar series at Swansea next week. I’ll be talking about some of the ideas that came out of the work we did with social media for the Contagion project.

Mostly the talk is about how ideas about space and spatial experience are important to understanding social media. This, very broadly, appears in two ways: (1) like any technology, how we use social media performs, reflects and reveals forms of spatial understanding and experience; and (2) both the methods and the subsequent analysis we do of social media, as geographers (but also that done in other disciplinary contexts), carry assumptions about space that perhaps need to be made more explicit (especially when methodological techniques carry contradictory assumptions about space to the ideas we then employ in our analysis). This comes from a far-too-long reflection on a manuscript written for publication that had some issues and in reflecting on those issues I realised that there were some interesting geographical issues to make more explicit.

Anyway, the seminar is at 2pm on the 18th of January in Glyndwr E (see 11.1 on this campus map). Hope to see a few people there…

Here’s the abstract:

Spacing Social Media

This talk will interrogate the promise as well as the critical implications of the emerging geographies of social media. In particular, the spacing of social media will be addressed in terms of the ways we might understand and theorise space and spatiality. There will be three parts to the discussion: First, the promise of social media research is addressed through an initial exploration of how those media are ineluctably entangled in changes within social, economic and political fields. Second, the translations of data in social media research are addressed through the applications and techniques involved. Third, this provides a basis for subsequent discussion of the theoretical implications of digital data methods and their spacings. I will argue that the techniques and discourses of social media methods both imply and challenge forms of spatial understanding that present challenges for geographical research.

9 February, 2016

Reblog> The scholar and social media

Excellent advice here from Tamson Pietsch on the uses and limits of social media, especially blogging. Found through @HelenPallett.

I very much support the ethos and practices suggested here:

The scholar and the social media

Last week I gave a talk on social media to post-graduates from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Foolishly (but only fairly) I promised to practice what I preached. So here are the salient points (and links) as I remember them.

Why you should think about the social media

Increasingly scholarly conversation is happening online – in curated and individual blogs, on twitter, and through other electronic forums. If you are not engaging with these forms of publication you are likely to be missing part of what is happening in your field.

Participating in the world of social media helps generate a bigger (and more diverse) academic audience for your research. Much of this will be in aligned disciplines, or in different national contexts. If you are not engaging online, you’ll be missing part of your potential audience.

Social media also helps generate a broader non-academic audience, especially with those industries to which your thesis may connect. Try to consciously develop and promote your “shadow expertise”; that aspect of your work that might inform a non-academic sector. It’s tough in the academic job market, and this could well be where your post-phd career ends up going.

And finally, social media is increasingly a factor in every employment sector. Engaging online gives you skills that will serve you well, wherever you work.

But always remember the golden rule

NEVER LET YOUR MOUTH EXCEED YOUR VOICE.

This is Stefan Collini’s advice to public intellectuals in Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain and it should be etched onto the computer screens of every academic who reaches for the internet. Have something to say that is well founded and established, and well supported. Be respectful of other people’s work and opinions and give them due reference. The last thing a junior (or indeed any) academic needs is to have a ruined reputation all over the internet.

If there is a second rule, it might be this: VALUE YOUR TIME – blogging & tweeting can be very rewarding because unlike most other parts of academic life you get direct feedback. But it’s a drug. Keep your main game in view and remember: your authority to speak will in 98% of cases come from your research. So respect it, foster it, prioritise it.

How to start

See how other people are doing it. Set up a twitter account and follow scholars you admire (and those you don’t!) Read the relevant blogs in your field – some of these are likely to be co-authored. If you are totally lost, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog page is as good a place as any to begin (and you have discovered this blog so you’re not doing too badly!)

People disagree on the merits of maintaining an individual blog as against contributing to established co-authored or other forums such as The Conversation, but my view is to go for both:

Set up a blog site for yourself that will act a bit like your online CV:
- use it to a) experiment with writing pieces and b) as a place to collect any material you publish on other platforms. WordPress is easy to use and integrates well with other social media.
Generate content:
- Work in progress & the process of working (see for eg. the Thesis Whisperer or Trickster Prince).
- Communicate research you have published (eg https://t.co/UCbgE8RslC)
- Wait for news item & apply research
- Provide context through your “shadow expertise” – are you writing a Phd on the history of fashion? Contact fashion magazines and pitch articles to them.
Maximise your reach
- Connect to other people’s online content through using links, and cross-promote on twitter (using #hashtags), facebook, linkedin and academia.edu.au, among other social media outlets.
- Write for established platforms, such as co-authored blogs, The Conversation, print outlets, your university, industry publications. The internet is a big place with a lot of shouting people on it, and you need to find a way to be heard. Established sites offer you support and a readership that is invaluable.

Parting comments

Academic research usually takes a long time to produce. It frequently works with complex information and tells stories that complicate what we think we know. The interwebs do not thrive on such complexity. This doesn’t mean you should go for simplifications , but it does mean you need to work with people’s attention spans. Put your argument up front, rather than at the end; try to stick to 500-800 words maximum. Inject some personality. Too often wonderful academic research is communicated in ways that do not make it easy for people to access or connect with. Paywalls and professional convention carry part of the responsibility, but as scholars we can do a lot more too to reach out to a public that has demonstrated a robust appetite for ideas.

Reading list

Prof Patrick Dunleavy’s Shorter, better, faster, free: blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is communicated and How to write a blogpost from your journal article

LSE public impact blog and in particular their twitter guide and reading list on using social media for research

The Times Higher Education magazine’s Tips for academics on Blogging and Social Media

11 January, 201611 January, 2016

Recommended: Cultural Geography Going Viral – provocation By @ProfGillian

Another interesting article out in the ‘Online Early’ section of Social & Cultural Geography is by Gillian Rose, from the “Provocations of the Present” OU event, way back in 2014(!).

Gillian gave an interesting talk on the day, which resonated with things I’ve written, and it’s interesting to read the ‘final’ version, entitled “Cultural Geography Going Viral“.

Using the example of Emily Thorberry’s injudicious tweet concerning white vans and the St George’s cross, Gillian explores how the techniques of analysis of such an image and how it is audienced, interpreted, circulated, and so on and, provocatively, discusses how “the skills of the cultural geographer are now widespread”:

In fact, they are probably no more widespread than they ever have been, but social media and online commentary is making them more visible than ever before. Everyone is reading cultural texts and coming to conclusions about their meaning and sharing their interpretations, it seems – and if they can’t understand what’s going on, they ask and they get an answer. Those answers unpack both the symbolism of specific cultural texts but also the production and circulation of those texts by specific forms of media institutions. In other words, cultural interpretation has gone viral.

This resonates in many ways with some of what I argue in my own ‘provocation‘, in which I argue that we (cultural geographers, and others) need to attend to the various ways on understanding mediation when discussing popular culture (and that we need to discuss popular culture more!)

Anyway, all this is simply to say that I recommend reading Prof. Rose’s article.

21 December, 2015

First Contagion paper – Translating social media: promises and problems for critical human geography

As one or two readers of this blog will know, I was a Co-I on the Contagion project led by Prof Steve Hinchliffe between September 2013 and May of this year (2015). The project investigated the idea and the performances of ‘contagion’ across several domains, including in relation to social media and in relation to disease. The first paper from the work on social media was recently completed and I’m happy to share some information here…

Those who found my brief post for the LSE’s ‘Impact’ blog concerning what I called the ‘political economy of Twitter data’ may find this paper of particular interest.

The paper’s title is Translating social media: promises and problems for critical human geography – ‘translation’ here addresses the (positive and negative) methodological potentials of the adaption and adoption of social media data and techniques (some of which are ‘black-boxed’) and their attendant epistemological assumptions.

The authors of the paper are myself, Rebecca Sandover (who was RA on the project and wrote some interesting blogposts concerning cognate issues) and Steve Hinchliffe.

Here is the abstract:

This article interrogates the promise as well as the critical implications of how social media reshape geographical research and in doing so offers an intervention into the emerging geographies of social media. The article is structured in three substantive parts: First, we introduce the promise of social media research through an initial exploration of how those media are ineluctably entangled in changes within social, economic and political fields. Second, the translations of data in social media research are addressed through the applications and techniques involved. Third, we focus upon issues relating to access to data and the ethics of gathering and interrogating social media data. This provides a basis for subsequent discussion of the theoretical implications of digital data methods and the performances of socialities online. This article signals how, through the exploration of different techniques, critical social media studies can speak to Rose’s (2015) challenge to chart the complexities of digitally–mediated cultural performances, interpretations and movements through the investigation of data attributes.

We have submitted this paper for review, so we’ll have to see what happens…

If you’d like to know more or would like a copy of the paper please feel free to get in touch.

11 December, 2015

Yik Yak on campus and the tensions of public anonymity

This piece in The Seattle Times offers a fairly succinct view on the tensions being performed through students’ use of YikYak, the ‘public’ location-based messaging system in which one posts to a location’s public conversation through an app.

Since the growth in population of social media there has also been a growth in the ‘back channel’ at events such as conferences, a ‘second screen’ conversation around ‘appointment TV’ (at least according to the BBC), and from Facebook onwards, there has been a mediated conversation in the background of university lectures.

The students, especially, first years, take some delight in offering observations about the lecture material, the lecturer and so on – amongst the wider hubbub of conversation about pets, hangovers and the relative qualities and number of attractive people on campus.

However, this can spillover into insult. As noted in the BBC local news coverage of one brave lecturer’s response to insults on YikYak at Bristol.

The Seattle Times piece illustrates how, just as in other kinds of social media, a perception of anonymity and the opportunity to perform ourselves otherwise allows some of us to grant ourselves permission to say some appalling things.

I’ve used the example of Yik Yak, in relation to the performance of identity, in a first year lecture… it may have made some of them think… (or maybe not)

23 November, 2015

“The dictatorship of data” (on BBC R4)

Just caught up with a programme aired on BBC Radio 4 last week called “The Dictatorship of Data“, presented by their Security Correspondent Gordon Corera. The role of the presenter certainly inflects the tone of the programme. It focuses on the growth in the collection of data, as the wholesale capture of data exhausts and meta-data from our devices and public platforms, and thus how that collection and then aggregation both allows and then presents problems for forms of surveillance.

It is an interesting programme insofar as it offers a general introduction to several key issues. The discussion of the geopolitical responses to the uses of social media platforms and how Russia in particular wants to capture some of that capability (particularly in relation to SORM) is good, and it mostly draws on the authors of a book that sounds good: “Red Web“. Likewise, there’s some entertaining and perhaps disquieting discussion of ‘The Hacking Team‘, purveyors of malware to governments. Again, this is understandably figured in geopolitical terms.

However, I’d say it is slightly wide of the mark in terms of the discussion offered of the prospects of social media enabling some kind of authoritarianism. The way it is discussed takes as it’s assumption that people are faithfully reporting their actual opinions, ‘real’ events and so on and that they are individuals (and not bots) – as though social media are some kind of unproblematic ‘social sensing platform’. Now, some will argue that there is a way to somehow ‘solve’ the ‘biasing’ of the sample represented by a given social media platform’s population and I’m no statistician so… meh. I remain skeptical that any kinds of claim about ‘representivity‘ are particularly meaningful.

I think those who want a more nuanced viewpoint on some of these issues probably ought to checkout Louise Amoore‘s The Politics of Possibility and her papers following on from this, likewise it’s worth checking out both David Murakami Wood and Francisco Klauser‘s work on surveillance too (of course, there’s more – but you have access to a search engine 😉 ).

18 November, 201518 November, 2015

The problematic imaginative geographies of collective ‘grieving’ on social media

This provocative article “Got a French flag on your Facebook profile picture? Congratulations on your corporate white supremacy” on The Independent‘s website makes for a compelling read.

I think is worth reading alongside the excellent letter from Paris by Judith Butler posted to the Verso blog “Mourning becomes the law” – also a must-read, really:

Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themseves as “at an impasse”, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I suppose this is why I prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through. It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you

A few snippets from The Independent article:

So you want to show solidarity with France – specifically, with those killed in Paris this weekend. If you’re a British person who wants to do that because you feel sympathy and sadness for people who are brutally massacred, regardless of their nationality, then fine. I just hope that you also change your profile picture to a different country’s flag every time people are wrongly killed as the result of international conflicts – for example, during the attack on Beirut in Lebanon just the day before.

…

Flags are politically and historically charged symbols (just look at the infamous and aptly self-styled Isis flag itself), symbolising states and representing influence, power, segregation, borders, nationalism and identity – some of the most commonly held reasons for armed conflict. It’s important, before overlaying a flag on your smiling face, to think about this.

…

I’m guessing you didn’t feel moved to drape yourself in the Tricolore [sic] until Facebook pushed that option out to you, possibly even until you saw how many people had already snapped it up. But paint-by-numbers solidarity when it’s foisted on you by one of the most powerful companies in the world is simply not the way to help a traumatised nation in shock after murder.

I’d just add that apparently the tricolor overlay implemented by Facebook has a setting that allows the user to automatically switch it off after a given length of time… how convenient.

There has, of course, been some interesting academic and journalistic discussion of what has been referred to as ‘recreational grieving’ and ‘mourning sickness‘ that is cognate to this argument, but the article above puts in sharper relief complex issues concerning the kinds of imaginative geographies that are being (re)produced and performed in response to the incredibly sad and horrific events that took place in Paris last weekend and their aftermath… something Derek Gregory has also written about on his blog.

8 October, 20158 October, 2015

Reblog> The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

From the Institute of Network Culture blog… This is a nice playful response to the ways in which we can see uses of social media as ‘work’:

The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

On Friday 25 September the Facebook Liberation Army made fresh calls to arms at the Discovery Festival in the science centre Nemo, Amsterdam.

Armed with pamphlets, zines and instructions on how to leave Facebook the resistance came disguised as Mark Zuckerberg. Many new rebels were enlisted in the Facebook Liberation Army and alternatives to social media platforms were discussed.

As well as offering advice on alternatives to Facebook the army also presented zines from The immaterial Labor union – a collective aimed to galvanize the workers of Facebook – initiated by Lidia Pereira. The evening was a resounding victory with even some people deciding to deactivate their Facebook accounts right their and then, serving to go on with their lives without negotiating Facebook’s terms of service.