The intimate workings of culture: An introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Christopher D Berk ◽  
Joshua B Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Indigenous Australia ◽  
The Social

This Cultural Dynamics Special Issue on “The Intimate Workings of Culture” examines the complex ways power, audience, and imagination are implicated in the social practices and politics of cultural intimacy. First theorized by Michael Herzfeld in 1997, cultural intimacy has proven to be a productive lens through which to explore the dialectic between the construction and contestation of collective identities. The contributors—Joshua Friedman, Jamie Shenton, Christopher Berk, and Tamar Shirinian—expand the concept’s geographical and contextual scope by applying it to Indigenous Australia, post-soviet states, American ethnic identity politics, and social media. The contributors’ shared emphasis on the emergent and indeterminate interrelationships between audience, imagination, power, and politics within the intimate workings of culture provides valuable templates for new arenas of analysis and inquiry.

Editorial: Refashioning stories for celebrity counterpublics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Ted Talks

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.

Local emergency management social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (7) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Sean Hildebrand, PhD ◽  
Brandon Waite, PhD
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Emergency Management ◽  
Disaster Preparedness ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Emergency Managers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Times

The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Emergency Management is to assess the state of disaster preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article adds to this discussion by examining the results of a national survey of emergency managers in the United States regarding the social media platforms they use to communicate information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, how proficient they feel using them, and what value they see in these technologies during the times of crisis. The authors’ findings help make sense of government responses to the pandemic, as well as contribute to the body of literature on communication and emergency management more broadly. Furthermore, their findings have important implications for emergency management practitioners and educators. 

scholarly journals Gender Politics and Discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511986180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ursula Lutzky ◽  
Robert Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Verbal Behavior ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.

scholarly journals PLATFORM SPECIFICITIES: THE PLATFORM BOOKS PANEL

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Ann Hendry ◽  
Katrin Tiidenberg ◽  
Crystal Abidin ◽  
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye ◽  
Jing Zeng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Ecosystem ◽  
Production Organization ◽  
Large Groups

Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books. Together, the papers offer an analysis of TikTok, WeChat, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. Because of the book-length analyses preceding the panel, we are able to distill what is distinct and recognizable about these platforms – what we call ‘platform specificities’ and demonstrate how these specificities are shaping not only the experiences of the users of those platforms, but the social media ecosystem more broadly. The panel contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding platform power, social media and ways of making sense of social media, painting in board strokes plausible future developments to keep an eye on. The extended abstract holds a panel rationale and five extended abstracts for each analyzed platform.

The Aspirational Labor of an Academic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Work Output ◽  
Striking Resemblance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation

This concluding chapter explains how the ideologies and social practices propelling the social media sphere bear a striking resemblance to contemporary academe. With its staid, ivory tower facade, the academy might seem far removed from the creative industries, a cluster of professions marked by an aura of bohemian cool. But it is much less of a conceptual leap to understand the creation and dissemination of knowledge as a form of cultural work. And many of the same venerated ideals—autonomy, flexibility, the perennial quest to “do what one loves”—seem to animate workers in both arenas. Indeed, academia is unique among professions that fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output, which might well be said of the creative industries.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Social Media + Society Special Issue on Selfies: Me-diated Inter-faces

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511664134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Warfield ◽  
Carolina Cambre ◽  
Crystal Abidin
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Society

scholarly journals Understanding the social in a digital age

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1125-1134
Author(s):  
Zoetanya Sujon ◽  
Harry T Dyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Public Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conventional Methods ◽  
Human Connection

Datafication, algorithms, social media and their various assemblages enable massive connective processes, enriching personal interaction and amplifying the scope and scale of public networks. At the same time, surveillance capitalists and the social quantification sector are committed to monetizing every aspect of human communication, all of which threaten ideal social qualities, such as togetherness and connection. This Special Issue brings together a range of voices and provocations around ‘the social’, all of which aim to critically interrogate mediated human connection and their contingent socialities. Conventional methods may no longer be adequate, and we must rethink not only the fabric of the social but the very tools we use to make sense of our changing social formations. This Special Issue raises shared concerns with what the social means today, unpicking and rethinking the seams between digitization and social life that characterize today’s digital age.

scholarly journals Mediatization of Emotion on Social Media: Forms and Norms in Digital Mourning Practices

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511774439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Korina Giaxoglou ◽  
Katrin Döveling
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Future Directions

This article provides the theoretical background for this Special Issue which explores the mediatization of emotion on social media as attested in different digital mourning practices. The overview discusses the affective and emotional turn alongside the mediatic turn in relation to key trends and foci in the study of affect/emotion. Our discussion points to a shift in conceptualizations of affect/emotion from mediated to mediatized practice, embedded in other social practices and subject to media and social media logics, affordances, and frames, which are worthy of empirical investigation. The article also presents key insights offered in the four articles of this Special Issue and foregrounds current and future directions in the study of mediatization, emotional sharing, and digital mourning practices.

#fernweh #wanderlust #explore: Reise- »Erzählungen« auf Instagram

Rhetorik ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Kuhlhüser
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Communicative Patterns ◽  
The Way

AbstractNowadays, we live in mediatized environments, which are more and more shaped by visual means of expression. Visual social media platforms, such as Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest and Snapchat, are now the tools of communication and self-representation - especially for the younger generations. How users of these visual social media use hashtags and pictures in a rhetorical way to realize their personal representation is shown in this article by analyzing ›travel-narrations‹ of public accounts on Instagram. After a short theoretical approach, which includes the application of the strategic rhetorical process on the social practices on Instagram, the hashtag and the picture are characterized as rhetorical instruments. The analysis showed that there are specific practices of idealized self-representation as a certain type of traveler and rhetorical-communicative patterns, concerning the way hashtags are applied and pictures are uploaded by the users. The result is that even on a mainly visual platform, like Instagram, pictures as a form of communication are too undefined without the textual component in form of hashtags, which are essential contextgiving resources. Thus, the successful realization of the self-representation includes both communication forms, which dialectically build meaning together.

Reimagining the Nation : Mass Media and Collective Identities in Europe

Res Publica ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-203
Author(s):  
Jan Servaes
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anthony Giddens ◽  
Benedict Anderson ◽  
Point Of Intersection

The interrelationschip of culture, nation and communication is one of the key themes in the study of collective identities and nationalism. In this opening article to this special issue this interrelationship is being assessed. The article aims to contribute to a discussion ofthe assumptions on which the above interrelationship is built.It is argued that nationhood is at the point of intersection with a plurality of discourses related to geography, history, culture, polities, ideology, ethnicity, religion, matriality, economics, and the social. The discourse of nationhood can best be understood in relation to boundedness, continuities and discontinuities, unnity and plurality, the authority of the past, and the imperative of the present.Contributions of a number of contemporary thinkers (Benedict Anderson, Wimal Dissanayake, Ernest Gellner, Sutart Hall, Eric Hosbawm, anthony Giddens, among others) are incorporated in this article in order to underline the complex and contested discursive terrain that nationhood undoubtedly is. It is concluded that various cultures also manifest different and fragmented identities.

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