A Pedagogue's Progress, the Cunningham Turn, and the Birth of Creator Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2110438
Author(s):  
David Craig
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Southern California ◽  
University Of Southern California ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
Research Initiative ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Global Research

As partners in an ongoing global research initiative over the past 6 years, Queensland University of Technology Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham and University of Southern California Clinical Professor David Craig mapped the rise of two competing communication and media industries, Social Media Entertainment and Wanghong. Alongside other vanguard scholars, Cunningham and Craig identified and framed the emergence of Creator Studies, an interdisciplinary field of studies focused on the dynamics of new forms of cultural production across social media platforms from diverse fields, methods, and epistemologies. These developments are described within a picaresque auto-ethnographic account of Cunningham's influence on the author's progression from Hollywood producer to scholar and pedagogue.

Making mirrors, making albums and making documentaries: the music of Gotye and negotiating Bourdieu's field of cultural production

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 669-684
Author(s):  
Pat O'Grady
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Music Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
Equipment Production ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Independent Musicians

AbstractRecent popular music and film studies have revealed the political functions of documentaries about musicians. These studies suggest that such documentaries make powerful interventions into the field of music production as they construct the value of their subjects and their work. Owing to the expense and complexity of broadcast equipment, production companies have tended to favour documentaries about artists and work considered to be popular and historically significant. Over the past 15 years, however, new technologies have allowed musicians to make documentaries themselves, which they can release at the same time as their song or album. Using the example of Gotye and his album Making Mirrors, this article argues that these developments have led to powerful and distinct interventions into debates and themes within home music production for independent musicians. It also argues that the use of this technology on social media platforms challenges the relationships between text and process.

scholarly journals The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110213
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy ◽  
Annika Pinch ◽  
Shruti Sannon ◽  
Megan Sawey
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ecological Model ◽  
Creative Economy ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Depth Interviews

While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of online visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—have been indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators on a range of social media platforms—Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, with a focus on the guiding logic of platform capitalism.

scholarly journals Quantified Nostalgia: Social Media, Metrics, and Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110088
Author(s):  
Benjamin N. Jacobsen ◽  
David Beer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Data ◽  
Focus Group Data ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Memory Practices ◽  
The Relationship

As social media platforms have developed over the past decade, they are no longer simply sites for interactions and networked sociality; they also now facilitate backwards glances to previous times, moments, and events. Users’ past content is turned into definable objects that can be scored, rated, and resurfaced as “memories.” There is, then, a need to understand how metrics have come to shape digital and social media memory practices, and how the relationship between memory, data, and metrics can be further understood. This article seeks to outline some of the relations between social media, metrics, and memory. It examines how metrics shape remembrance of the past within social media. Drawing on qualitative interviews as well as focus group data, the article examines the ways in which metrics are implicated in memory making and memory practices. This article explores the effect of social media “likes” on people’s memory attachments and emotional associations with the past. The article then examines how memory features incentivize users to keep remembering through accumulation. It also examines how numerating engagements leads to a sense of competition in how the digital past is approached and experienced. Finally, the article explores the tensions that arise in quantifying people’s engagements with their memories. This article proposes the notion of quantified nostalgia in order to examine how metrics are variously performative in memory making, and how regimes of ordinary measures can figure in the engagement and reconstruction of the digital past in multiple ways.

scholarly journals A GOOD LIFE? CRITICAL FEMINIST APPROACHES TO INFLUENCER ECOLOGIES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Glatt ◽  
Sarah Banet-Weiser ◽  
Sophie Bishop ◽  
Francesca Sobande ◽  
Elizabeth Wissinger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Barriers To Entry ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial self-actualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. Social media influencers are envied by audiences as having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a living (Duffy 2017). Despite this ostensive accessibility and relatability, today’s high-profile influencer culture continues to be shaped by ‘preexisting gendered and racial scripts and their attendant grammars of exclusion’ as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argued in the early days of socially mediated entrepreneurship (p. 89; see also Bishop, 2017). In Western contexts only a narrow subset of white, cis-gender, and heterosexual YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers, and Twitch streamers tend to achieve visibility as social media star-creators, and celebratory discourses of diversity and fairness mask problematic structures that exclude marginalized identities from opportunities to attain success. A key aim of this panel is thus to draw attention to marginalized creator communities and subjectivities, including women, non-white, and queer creators, all of whom face higher barriers to entry and success. More broadly, by taking seriously both the practices and discourses of social media influencers, the panellists aim to challenge popular denigrations of influencers as vapid, frivolous, or eager to freeload. We locate such critiques in longstanding dismissals of feminized cultural production (Levine, 2013) and argue, instead, that we need to take seriously the role of influencers in various social, economic, and political configurations.

Public Service Media and Social TV: Bridging or Expanding Gaps in Participation?

2015 ◽  
Vol 154 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Tv ◽  
Content Consumption ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities while fostering national culture and the public sphere. Social media platforms and projects – specifically ‘social TV’ – have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However it can be argued that, instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may in fact reconstruct participation barriers within PSM production processes. This article explores ABC co-creation between Twitter and the # 7DaysLater television program, a narrative-based comedy program that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly program. The article demonstrates why the ABC should engage with social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with # 7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process.

Scientific Mapping of Social Media in Education: A Decade of Exponential Growth

2020 ◽  
pp. 073563312097201
Author(s):  
Jessie S. Barrot
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Scientific Output ◽  
Media In Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Steady Growth ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Geographical Scope ◽  
Bibliometric Approach ◽  
Social Media In Education

Given the increasing number of research on social media for educational purposes, few studies have examined the scientific literature in this field of interest. However, reviews that comprehensively mapped this research landscape in a broader view remain very limited. It is on this premise that the current study identifies the growth trajectory, distribution, and topical foci of scientific literature on social media in education published between 2007 and 2019. A total of 2,215 documents from Scopus-indexed journals were analysed. Using a bibliometric approach, the findings show a steady growth of scientific output and citations and the expansion of the topical foci in the past decade. Of the 15 examined social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have attracted the greatest attention, while the rest remained underexplored or unexplored. The popularity of certain platforms among scholars was attributed to three factors: the number of active users, the pedagogical affordances, and the geographical scope. Implications for future studies are discussed.

scholarly journals Streamer-Interface-Viewer Entanglement

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (70) ◽  
pp. 131-150
Author(s):  
Zhen Ye
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Live Streaming ◽  
Power Relationship ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Two Stages ◽  
The Ideal

In China, the live-streaming industry has a distinctive model of cultural production: showroom live-streaming. It is often adopted by social media platforms to complement other social networking activities. This study reveals the ways in which social media platforms (specifically, Douyin and Momo) design their showroom livestreaming interfaces and aff ordances to normalise and commodify the aff ective interactions between female streamers and their male viewers and to establish a gendered power relationship. Using the walkthrough method during two stages of the apps (entry to live-streaming chatrooms and the everyday use of live-streaming chatrooms), this study analyses various aff ordances regarding their functional, sensory, and cognitive impacts on users. This research thereby demonstrates that the live-streaming interface design constructs two types of subject positions. The ideal user is constructed as a heterosexual male, who is empowered through the consumption of virtual gifts; in contrast, the interface nudges the female streamers to conduct emotional labour and deliver implicitly sexualised performances to maintain an aff ective relationship with viewers.

scholarly journals A Framework for Interrogating Social Media Images to Reveal an Emergent Archive of War

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 196-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arijus Pleska ◽  
Andrew Hoskins ◽  
Karen Renaud
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Media Images ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Identification Techniques

The visual image has long been central to how war is seen, contested and legitimised, remembered and forgotten. Archives are pivotal to these ends as is their ownership and access, from state and other official repositories through to the countless photographs scattered and hidden from a collective understanding of what war looks like in individual collections and dusty attics. With the advent and rapid development of social media, however, the amateur and the professional, the illicit and the sanctioned, the personal and the official, and the past and the present, all seem to inhabit the same connected and chaotic space. However, to even begin to render intelligible the complexity, scale and volume of what war looks like in social media archives is a considerable task, given the limitations of any traditional human-based method of collection and analysis. We thus propose the production of a series of ‘snapshots’, using computer-aided extraction and identification techniques to try to offer an experimental way in to conceiving a new imaginary of war. We were particularly interested in testing to see if twentieth century wars, obviously initially captured via pre-digital means, had become more ‘settled’ over time in terms of their remediated presence today through their visual representations and connections on social media, compared with wars fought in digital media ecologies (i.e. those fought and initially represented amidst the volume and pervasiveness of social media images). To this end, we developed a framework for automatically extracting and analysing war images that appear in social media, using both the features of the images themselves, and the text and metadata associated with each image. The framework utilises a workflow comprising four core stages: (1) information retrieval, (2) data pre-processing, (3) feature extraction, and (4) machine learning. Our corpus was drawn from the social media platforms Facebook and Flickr.

scholarly journals Comparative Analysis of Deep Learning Techniques to detect Online Public Shaming

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 03030
Author(s):  
Mehdi Surani ◽  
Ramchandra Mangrulkar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Learning Models ◽  
Media Usage ◽  
The Past ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Machine Learning Models

Over the past years the exponential growth of social media usage has given the power to every individual to share their opinions freely. This has led to numerous threats allowing users to exploit their freedom of speech, thus spreading hateful comments, using abusive language, carrying out personal attacks, and sometimes even to the extent of cyberbullying. However, determining abusive content is not a difficult task and many social media platforms have solutions available already but at the same time, many are searching for more efficient ways and solutions to overcome this issue. Traditional models explore machine learning models to identify negative content posted on social media. Shaming categories are explored, and content is put in place according to the label. Such categorization is easy to detect as the contextual language used is direct. However, the use of irony to mock or convey contempt is also a part of public shaming and must be considered while categorizing the shaming labels. In this research paper, various shaming types, namely toxic, severe toxic, obscene, threat, insult, identity hate, and sarcasm are predicted using deep learning approaches like CNN and LSTM. These models have been studied along with traditional models to determine which model gives the most accurate results.

scholarly journals Mapping Nefarious Social Media Actors to Speed-up Covid-19 Fact-checking

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Giglietto ◽  
Manolo Farci ◽  
Giada Marino ◽  
Serena Mottola ◽  
Tommaso Radicioni ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Prototype Tool ◽  
Research Initiative ◽  
Information Operations ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Ecosystem ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
Fact Checking ◽  
The University

This report presents the outcomes of a project aimed at developing and testing a prototype tool that supports and speeds-up the work of fact-checkers and de-bunkers by surfacing and ranking potentially problematic information circulated on social media with a content-agnostic approach. The tool itself is the result of a multi-year research activity carried on within the Mapping Italian News Research Program of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo to study the strategies, tactics and goals of information operations aimed at manipulating the Italian public opinion by exploiting the vulnerabilities of the contemporary media ecosystem. This research activity led to developing original studies, public reports, new methods, maps and tools employed to study the activity of Italian nefarious social media actors aimed at amplifying the reach and impact of problematic information by coordinating their efforts. Tracking these actors proved instrumental to observe the “infodemic” unraveling during the early days of COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. Combining this existing knowledge with a range of original tools and data sources provided by Meta’s Facebook Open Research Initiative (Fort) and by The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter, the report: documents those early days by highlighting a list of widely viewed and interacted links circulated on Facebook; traces the establishment, growth and evolution of Italian covid-skeptic coordinated networks on Facebook; presents a comprehensive and updated map of the activities performed by these networks of nefarious social media actors; unveils a set of original tactics and strategies employed by these actors to adjust their operations to the mitigation efforts adopted by social media platforms to reduce the spread of problematic information; describes the circulation of three specific piece of problematic information; provides an overview of the outcomes of the testing phase (carried out in collaboration with Facta.news) of a prototype tool that surfaces and ranks potentially problematic information circulated on social media with a content-agnostic approach.

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