social media – Page 4

5 October, 2015

Reblog> Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 cfp

Tony Sampson has posted this, may be of interest to people who see this blog –

Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 – cfp

Wednesday 23rd March 2016

1-8pm

University of East London, Docklands Campus, Room EB. G.06

Call for 15min Presentations/Position Papers

Following on from the success of last year’s Affect and Social Media research symposium, the emotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at UEL, and in collaboration this year with Cass School of Education and Communities at UEL, will be hosting a second event continuing to explore the relation between social media, affect, feelings and emotions.

Numerous studies from various fields have described interactions with social media in terms of emotional, affective and feely experiences. It is claimed that habitual access to Facebook can have a negative impact on mood and subjective well-being (Kross et al, 2013). Likewise, emotional states experienced on social media can be transferred to others through emotional contagion, ‘leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’ (Kramer, 2014). Similarly, positive emotions, like joy, are regarded as more likely to spread than negative ones (Berger and Milkman, 2010).

This year’s call for 15min presentations/position papers asks contributors to explore emotional, affective and feely experiences with social media. More specifically, we ask contributors to investigate how social media ‘work[s] in concert with bodies in the production of emotional and affective activity’ (Ellis and Tucker, 2015: 177).

We welcome proposals on a wide variety of themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. For example”¦

Addiction and social media
Affective contagion
Affect theory relating to social media
Care, emotions and social media
Methodologies relating to emotion, affect and social media
Consumption, emotions and affect on social media
Education, emotions and social media
Emotional and affective contagions
Emotional social media design (theory and practice)
Ethical considerations
Felt experiences on social media
Social gaming and emotions
HCI and emotion
Learning, emotion and social media
Marketing, emotion and social media
Networked emotions
Online emotional ethnographies
Pervasive computing and emotion
Emotions and privacy
Emotions and security
Sharing emotions
Emotions and trust
The politics of emotional user experiences

Please send a title, brief outline (100words) and institutional affiliation to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk and E.Theodotou@uel.ac.uk

Activities	Deadlines
Abstract Submission	15th December 2015
Acceptance notification	15th January 2016
Registration for presenters	Details to follow
Registration for all participants	Details to follow

Fees and registration

(Refreshments, after symposium drinks and nibbles and attendance certificate included in all registration types)

Type	Fee
Presenters	Free
UEL students/academics	Free
External students	£3
External academics/participants	£5

Please keep an eye out for follow up emails regarding registration

Updates will also appear on the Virality blog and EmotionUX news page

https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/

http://emotionuxlab.co.uk/news/

3 July, 2015

Computing the human – biometrics and our dividual selves

Over on the excellent Aeon website there’s a beta section called ‘Ideas‘ that poses questions and solicits responses. One such question is: “How will biometrics transform surveillance culture?“. To which Kelly Gates (UCSD) offers an adroit response in the form of a short essay entitled ‘Computerising Humans‘.

Gates unpicks the technological deterministic fatalism of the expectation that the widespread deployment of biometric technologies is a foregone conclusion. She argues:

There’s also an assumption that in the very near future, these technologies will be capable of automatically identifying us with near-perfect accuracy, free of the messy cultural baggage that muddles the way humans identify one another. Human perception is inherently biased and flawed, according to this logic, while computers are inherently objective, free from error and prejudice.

It follows that, and as Gates goes on to argue, to invent the technology, be the owner of the data upon which it operates and then verify the ‘accuracy’ of that technology (as Facebook do with their facial recognition systems) means that one necessarily invents the accuracy of that technology as well. Likewise, in creating such systems and the parameters in which they (must) operate (to be effective) we necessarily circumscribe and predetermine their uses, and thus also invent their usefulness. Therefore, in this sense, by inventing the technology and its usefulness we invent the future in which it is necessary:

In other words, inventing the accuracy of biometric technologies involves making bigger claims about what they can do than their limited experimental results can support.

Of course, such a process of invention is also, necessarily, a (re)invention of our ‘selves’, in multiple. It is a kind of ontogenetic (and more specifically here, technogenetic process, as Gates highlights – although I prefer Simondon to Hayles on this point). The multiple nature of the data representations of our ‘selves’ convenes the various ways in which we are conceived as entities, in data and in flesh, and thus the multiple ways our identities are performed. We are reinvented by looking back at our-selves through the ‘eyes’ of the technology: the surveillant relation between the unblinking gaze of the technology and our performance of identity is co-constituted.

Understanding ourselves as fully enmeshed with technologies might help us get a better sense of what biometrics portend for our already surveillant culture. We already conceive of ourselves as people with official identities composed of disembodied aggregates of transaction-generated data–digital representations of ourselves that circulate over networks. In fact, it is a necessary precondition of biometric system development that we conceive of ourselves in this way. In short, if computers are getting better at recognizing humans, it’s because humans are getting much better at looking at, and seeing themselves, much like computers.

A helpful way of understanding this is through the brief exposition of the ‘dividual’ Deleuze makes in his Postscript on the Societies of Control: “a physically embodied human […] that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via the modern technologies of control, like computer-based systems” (as Robert Williams has it). If we look at the production and performance of our selves, as ‘dividuals’, we are, I would argue, confronting the necessity to un-think “the subject” (following J-D Dewsbury’s Deleuzian reading of Badiou). We accordingly consume our selves by trusting in the apparatuses of multiple surveillance (Facebook etc.) and are invited to deny what is incalculable.

Stiegler would perhaps argue that to combat our rendering as biometric surveillant subjects we must take care of our selves, of our incalculability; believe in that incalculability, and make that care a basis of our political economic relations. Of course, that is far easier said than done. Biometric technology does not necessitate the rendering of ‘dividuals’, that future is not a forgone conclusion, but it will take a lot of work to invent an alternative.

9 June, 20152 July, 2015

The anti-social academic blogger? A post by Sam Merrill

Over on his (re)new(ed) blog/site Sam Merrill has posted about blogging and his uneasiness with some of the less collegial, more narcissistic, and perhaps more target-driven (in the vein of h-index etc. perhaps[?]) implications of blogging becoming a normalised part of academic practice. Its definitely worth a read in full [here] but I’ve copied some choice excerpts below…

It all reminds me just a little too much of Zygmunt Bauman’s keynote at the re:publica 15 conference that I attended last month. He discussed how today most people seek publicity rather than privacy, primarily through social media use, and they are thus replacing the community networks which previously belonged to them with the social networks to which they now belong. […]

There is now a widespread acknowledgement that academic progression, especially at the early career stage, often relies on one’s ability to develop their own recognisable brand. This narcissist factor of academic social media use is another that leaves me feeling inherently uneasy about blogging even as I engage in it more and more willingly (the narcissism that is, not the blogging). […]

Although there is little new about Bauman’s prognosis – that social media leads to the state of being alone together – the fact a future colleague later admitted that what Bauman had described sounded just like him made me shudder as I realised that if the pressure to use social media and the Internet for academic purposes was so apparent across the disciplines that I had already encountered (archaeology and geography in particular), then what must it be like in the field of social media studies that I was about to join – and how would I ever find enough time to relieve it!

I suppose I’m inclined to argue that including blogging in your academic practice is only really worth it if it isn’t a chore, if it doesn’t become another target to hit, and if it enables us to celebrate our collective exploration of ideas – otherwise, its surely (yet) another instrument of ‘governmentality‘ ~ those logics we internalise by which we are in some sense controlled, as workers, and become alienated from our labours… in the sense in which it seems that those that work in academia (at least in the UK) are really good at internalising and living out precisely those logics we critique as neo-liberal (i.e. the REF and so on…) and just to be crystal clear, I am just as guilty of this as any.

5 June, 20152 July, 2015

Professional web presence

Another post from a train (with very poor connection and so actually uploaded from my office)…

Re-reading the responses by Clive Barnett and Jeremy Crampton to my post about ‘being a sharing academic‘ reminded me, eventually, about the conversations held on the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ about blogging in March 2011, the session ‘Between freedom and narcissism?‘ at the AAG in 2013, for which Scott Rodgers wrote a really useful blogpost (see below) and the useful publication by Wilson and Starkweather in the Professional Geographer on the ‘web presence of academic geographers‘.

Scott Rodgers reflected upon how he uses his blog, in 2013, and opened his thoughts out to consider how he has drifted away from ‘myopic blog-writing’ to engaging in discussion and sharing across several different kinds/platforms of media. Concluding his blogpost Scott argued, and I can only agree, that:

contemporary social media are becoming less and less tools that academics can opt out of. Rather, they increasingly comprise the basic environments of academic practice, and at a time of shifting priorities in higher education, these are environments academics need to claim.

The conclusions to the paper by Wilson and Starkweather are another useful way of framing some of the issues that arose between the blogposts written by Clive, Jeremy and myself and I think are worth quoting here:

The Web presence of academic geographers can no longer necessarily be described as a static online listing of the accomplishments of an individual scholar. Instead, the Web practices of academic geographers are increasingly marked by … a focus on online interaction and engagement, despite the lack of professionalization along these lines. Early-career geographers are likely not trained in this aspect of academic reproduction and might be flatly discouraged from “wasting their time” by producing online content. Given the continually shifting norms of online practices in society, and in academia itself, however, perhaps serious debate about strategies for using [social media] tools should enter into the training and professionalization of young scholars. The fact that academics would best avoid directing all of their writing energies into their Twitter account is all the more reason for explicit discussions about how to productively manage one’s Web presence.

We do not believe that it is wise to dismiss blogging, microblogging, and online social networking as nothing more than a distraction from the serious work of academic life. Not only are these new patterns of online engagement seemingly here to stay and are likely bound up in broader shifts in performance pressures but they also offer some notable potential scholarly benefits if used with intention.

First, pressures to publish and promote have spilled out into Web practices like blogging and microblogging. The blog can act as a way to claim intellectual territory, just as it can provide a space to share nascent ideas and work out scholarly thought in conversation with far-flung peers.

Second, and relatedly, online social networks and other informal venues for sharing scholarly productions have become important amidst the uncertainty of secure employment alongside the neoliberalization of the university. Junior academics, perhaps more than their senior colleagues, might rely on these Web practices to remain visible and viable among a growing body of recently minted PhDs.

Third, many junior scholars likely completed the bulk of their advanced degree post-Facebook. These online social networks provide the avenue for keeping informed of others’ engagements (scholarly and otherwise) and nurture the local and translocal collectives that are so important in the professional development of early-career academic geographers.

…
As institutions of higher education grapple with new pressures in a knowledge economy, academic geographers should incorporate everyday Web practices alongside the more observed and investigated techniques of a neoliberalizing academe.

(Wilson and Starkweather 2014, p. 79, additional emphasis)

I wonder, not least as a committee member of two RGS-IBG research groups, if the need for integrating the uses of various media into the training and professionalisation of early-career academics might be better-served by professional associations such as the AAG and the RGS-IBG. We could, for example, offer workshops as part of annual conferences and events. If nothing else, we could help one another by more-openly sharing things that have worked for us and perhaps where we may have slipped-up and how that might be avoided. This is definitely something I think is worth consideration by those involved in our professional associations.

4 June, 20152 July, 2015

Curating attention (Being a sharing academic pt. II)

My post from the train yesterday on blogging kept me thinking throughout the day. I wanted to discuss some of the responses (which makes up the majority of this post) and quickly clarify a couple of things. My initial post was, I recognise a little bit hypocritical: 1. My blog wouldn’t meet the ‘regular’ criteria I suggested for the list of blogs; and so, 2. I recognise that I am not, by any means, an exemplar of the sharing to which I aspire.

The blogpost led me to solicit some responses via Twitter (to which I’ll return) and I was really pleased to read posts from Jeremy Crampton and Clive Barnett, whose blogs and wider work I regularly read and admire. Likewise, not least because it is cross-posted there, the blog generated a little bit of discussion on Twitter with some interesting comments from Gillian Rose and Murray Lowe:

@CLIVEYB I agree with @samkinsley about solitariness of geog bloggers, inc me, and with @JeremyCrampton that twitter is better for sharing.

– gillian rose (@ProfGillian) June 3, 2015

@ProfGillian @CLIVEYB @samkinsley @JeremyCrampton Its definitely a bit more dynamic, although so much that a lot whizzes by

– Murray Low (@MurrayLow3) June 3, 2015

I very much welcome further comments and responses, so please do feel free to comment, blog elsewhere or tweet 🙂

Nevertheless, I wanted to collect together the conversation (so far) here (and I’ll return to that idea) and draw out two key points and make some comments.

First, in response to my observation about the use of some of the social plug-ins like ‘re-blog’ Jeremy (who does use it) observed

This works very well within the WordPress ecosystem, but have you noticed how infrequently this option comes up on blogs or news stories etc”¦they all have Instagram (never used it) Reddit (ditto) etc but not reblog.

to which I can only agree and add the corollary that, as I touched on in my earlier post, sharing and developing ideas cannot be platform-dependent, as both Jeremy and Gillian noted:

twitter is where things seemed to be shared most effectively

The ethos of sharing I am trying to invoke has to go where the conversations can best be served. As Martin Weller suggests in the piece in The Chronicle to which I linked previously:

A key aspect of the digital revolution is not the direct replacement of one form of scholarly activity with another, but rather the addition of alternatives to existing forms

We might do this across all sorts of media, from Twitter and Facebook, to Instagram and Reddit (as Jeremy suggests) and further to Tumblr, Pinterest, and Storify. The most important thing for me here is that we are convening a conversation at all and that it brings about the opportunity to share, celebrate, and disagree about topics that matter to us. So, and to clarify, I am arguing that for me it’s not about the nuts-and-bolts of the platform, it’s about the ethos of sharing.

This leads me on to my second point. In his post about the uses of blogging and his own blog, my colleague Clive Barnett makes an interesting case for the necessity to see the activity as both a personal fulfilment; a ploughing of an individual furrow (i.e. the ‘lone wolf’) and a contribution to collective knowledge production. The way in which I agree with this is in terms of another observation Clive makes:

I can see how a blog can serve as a way in which one can curate one’s own on-going thinking.

While I totally agree with both Jeremy’s and Gillian’s points about Twitter being the medium par excellence for sharing things, the considered thinking through of what is shared, through comments and responses at length, and the bringing together of multiple sources (like in this post) remains better served by blogs. As Clive says (and so have many others), academic sharing is a form of curation.

Curation certainly can be the ‘micro-broadcasting’ and the ‘construction of anonymous publics’ Clive discusses, through tags, categories, hashtags and so on. It can also be the bringing together of interlocutors both on and off the blog. The curation is never solely located on the blog: the blog is instead a signifier, perhaps a place-holder, for the performance of the curation/conversation. If, as Clive argues, ‘sharing only makes sense if things are separable‘ then the activities of curation are precisely those means of doing the separating (and assembling).

I want to make a final observation about attention, which Clive raises. If this mode of sharing (blogging and using social media) I’ve been stumbling over suggesting is roughly analogous to care of one’s self (Clive’s ‘Me’) in the form of writing[1] then the mechanisms of that writing can both enable and hamper that care. In publicly curating ideas we are soliciting attention and the platforms are not neutral equipment in that solicitation.

To post and share on social media is not only to share with readers but also with those who own/run the platform for the purposes of marketing. Likewise, when and how we ‘pay attention’, as users, is also surveilled in order to serve adverts. Attention then, is commodified (as Patrick Crogan and I highlighted in a 2012 theme issue of Culture Machine).

I whole-heartedly agree that Twitter, in particular, has been brilliantly useful for sharing –like Jeremy I joined in 2009 and it has very much enriched my academic life. Nevertheless, those conversations are only really easily accessible in the moment (which is fine, up to a point) but it is non-trivial to retrieve them from Twitter’s archive (if you want). What you post to Twitter and other social media platforms, as data, is a commodity – and it has a monetary value.

So, as with traditional forms of publication (in the guise of journal articles [behind the paywall] or monographs [in expensive hardcover only editions]) we have to remain mindful about access: who has it, who the gatekeepers are, and how we accordingly curate our forms of sharing. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that such sharing is vital. To misquote Beckett (again): “share again, share better“.

Notes

1. And thus a form of hypomnesis (riffing on Jeremy’s allusion to his work on Foucault and hypomnemata) ~ worth reading Stiegler on this, see: this Ars Industrialis vocabulary entry.

3 June, 20152 July, 2015

Being a sharing academic

Recently I compiled a list of active (i.e. regularly updated) geography blogs and it got me musing about how we variously construct and perform our academic identities. These are some half-formed thoughts on a train about this in relation to uses of blogging [then edited in my office…].

It was a surprise to me how quite a few of those blogs, with some honourable exceptions, are tightly focussed conduits for personal research and are not participating in wider online/offline conversations. One of the big claims made for blogging in the noughties was, of course, that ‘social’ media precisely enable broader conversations. While the majority of those active geography bloggers I found use wordpress.com for their blogs they do not seem to use the ‘social’ functions such as ‘reblog’ and other conversation tools on the platform.

Now, I recognise that I am just as guilty as any in this (although I don’t use wordpress.com). I do, at least, try and share other people’s work – especially cos this blog cross-posts to Twitter. That multi-platform-ness is also important, blogs aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of convening such conversations. For example, while it is persistently bemoaned, the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ has hosted some interesting discussions amongst anglophone geographers.

There are, of course, lots of resources, endorsements and manifestos for academic blogging within and beyond a variety of disciplinary contexts. On this, I heartily recommend reading The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity (in The Chronicle) by my former boss Martin Weller, and his open access book The Digital Scholar. See also, for example, the posts about blogging on the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog, and this piece on what makes a successful research blog by Pat Thomson in particular.

This leads me to the perpetual tension between two, often-opposing, pulls on how (in very broad terms) we perform academic identity: the ‘lone wolf’ syndrome of career progression and the aspiration to contribute to the collective production of knowledge.

On the one hand, to progress, especially as an early career academic, it is (sadly) important to develop a recognisable ‘project’ or ‘brand’ to allow employers to easily categorise you (probably to slot you into a REF submission), and this more-often-than-not involves ploughing an individual furrow – writing the position papers, getting single author papers published for a REF submission, applying for individual funding (such as the ESRC’s ‘Future Research Leader’ scheme), and attempting to speak to the fashionable debates (e.g. the ‘anthropocene’, ‘mobilities’ and ‘neoliberalism’). I am by no means against such actions (apart from the instrumental logics that sit behind a lot of it), these are part and parcel of being an academic, but it often feels to me that this leads to a lot of individuals talking past one another.

On the other hand, we all (I hope) aspire to advancing knowledge around those things about which are passionate and this must surely be a collective endeavour. Some of the very best events I have attended have been the small workshops where people present ideas, not in a scripted and tightly timed presentation, but in more discursive, less-pressured ways.

Surely blogging can address both of these drives: you can promote your work, but (and for me – more importantly) you can contribute to conversations and celebrate one another’s work. This is, broadly, what it can mean to participate in a community of practice as Lave & Wenger suggest (although–I don’t agree with everything in the linked piece).

We could all, perhaps, take a few more ‘risks’ and put our ideas ‘out there’ a little more to involve people in their development, rather than simply present our polished final argument/ results. My own academic hero in this regard is Anne Galloway, who’s intellectual curiosity and generosity has been an inspiration to me. From her PhD-related blog PLSJ, through to her subsequent blogs/projects the design culture lab and the more-than-human lab, Anne has offered insights, provocations and opened conversations. Indeed, Anne’s chapter on blogging in her PhD thesis is a really interesting and helpful (and probably more rigorous!) way of thinking about what I’m trying to get at here.

I recognise that for those early in their careers and those that feel embattled and under increasing institutional pressure this feels almost impossible, but(!) –I’d argue that the potential gains are worth it. I’ve found fantastically generous colleagues across the world through social media, who have profoundly enriched my work and I heartily recommend it.

I’ll conclude this post with (celebrating/advocating) some excerpts from Mel Gregg’s article ‘Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as conventional scholarship‘ that sum up what I’m trying to say better than I can (especially after lots and lots of marking!):

The participatory nature of writing, response and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and thinking-in-process. In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. (p. 154)

Blogs are a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech traditionally securing academic privilege
[…]
Blogs allow us to write in conjunction with non-academic ‘peers’ and ‘colleagues’ who not only value and improve our ideas but practice their own rigorous forms of assessment, critique and review.
Blogs are counter-heroic in that they expose the life of the academic as banal. They help lay bare the fallacy of the ivory tower scholar secluded from the concerns of the ‘real world’ (pp.157-158)

If the grandiose aspiration of ‘making new contributions to knowledge’ is to hold any truth it surely has to be a collective endeavour. To misquote Beckett: ‘Share again, share better’.

5 January, 20158 January, 2015

A political economy of Twitter data – revised and published on LSE Impact blog

Last year I wrote a blog post for the Contagion project website, building from the experience of attempting to do research with Twitter data as relative novices. Putting the pragmatic techniques of doing such to one side, it became striking that doing this kind of research with Twitter’s apparatus is neither easy, nor, when one delves a bit deeper, is it ‘free’.

The post was been picked up by the LSE Impact blog, who asked to re-blog it, which was very nice of them. So, you can find a slightly updated (numbers, sources and bit more nuance in the argument) version of the blog post there.

The question I end up posing is: “Should researchers be using data sources (however potentially interesting/valuable) that restrict the capability of reproducing our research results?” This is not easily answered, not least when so many ‘non-academic’ researchers are merrily plugging away producing social scientific research, increasingly consumed by the general public, which is gaining influence, and which, perhaps, could benefit from some critical engagement…

Please do read the post and get in touch if you’d like to discuss this, and any of our research, further.