Media practices in the making of an “other space”: Communicating inclusion, exclusion, and belonging in a controversial heterotopia

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 2166-2182
Author(s):  
Emilia Ljungberg
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Media Use ◽  
New Age ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Media Practices

New age practitioners and other alternative groups seek to create a heterotopia at a distance from mainstream society, and this necessitates some control over the use of media practices. To theorize the role of digital media in the making of a heterotopia, I have studied Ängsbacka, a community for alternative lifestyles, in a small mid-Swedish town. Using the concept of heterotopia as a starting point to understand how Ängsbacka functions as a space outside of mainstream society, I then use media theories about disconnection and the avoidance of context collapse in the analysis of their media practices. The analysis shows that the community has an ambivalent set of both explicit and implicit rules and norms aiming at both inclusion and exclusion of digital media. Studying the role of media use in the construction of a heterotopia adds new layers to the ongoing discussion about the use and non-use of digital media.

Deepfaking Keanu: YouTube deepfakes, platform visual effects, and the complexity of reception

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110304
Author(s):  
Lisa Bode
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Digital Rhetoric ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Media Creation ◽  
Media Practices

On July 14, 2019, a 3-minute 36-second video titled “Keanu Reeves Stops A ROBBERY!” was released on YouTube visual effects (VFX) channel, Corridor. The video’s click-bait title ensured it was quickly shared by users across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Comments on the video suggest that the vast majority of viewers categorised it as fiction. What seemed less universally recognised, though, was that the performer in the clip was not Keanu Reeves himself. It was voice actor and stuntman Reuben Langdon, and his face was digitally replaced with that of Reeves, through the use of an AI generated deepfake, an open access application, Faceswap, and compositing in Adobe After Effects. This article uses Corridor’s deepfake Keanu video (hereafter shorted to CDFK) as a case study which allows the fleshing out of an, as yet, under-researched area of deepfakes: the role of framing contexts in shaping how viewers evaluate, categorise, make sense of and discuss these images. This research draws on visual effects scholarship, celebrity studies, cognitive film studies, social media theory, digital rhetoric, and discourse analysis. It is intended to serve as a starting point of a larger study that will eventually map types of online manipulated media creation on a continuum from the professional to the vernacular, across different platforms, and attending to their aesthetic, ethical, cultural and reception dimensions. The focus on context (platform, creator channel, and comments) also reveals the emergence of an industrial and aesthetic category of visual effects, which I call here “platform VFX,” a key term that provides us with more nuanced frames for illuminating and analysing a range of manipulated media practices as VFX software becomes ever more accessible and lends itself to more vernacular uses, such as we see with various face swap apps

scholarly journals “HEY, I LIKE YOUR VIDEOS. RELATE MUCH!”LOCATING SISTERHOOD IN A POSTCOLONIAL PUBLIC ON YOUTUBE

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earvin Charles Borja Cabalquinto ◽  
Cheryll Soriano
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Mutual Support ◽  
Foreign National ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
Media Channels ◽  
Interracial Relationship ◽  
Media Practices ◽  
Government Benefits

As part of a broader project that seeks to investigate the brokering of digitally-mediated intimacies through matchmaking platforms and social media channels, this paper unpacks the formation of ‘online sisterhood’ in a postcolonial intimate public, as evinced in the comments of viewers on selected YouTube videos of Rhaze, a Filipina YouTuber who is married to an Australian man. With a massive following of over 450 thousand followers, Rhaze’s videos typically receive diverse comments from her viewers and subscribers. This exposition is facilitated by collecting, categorising and analysing selected comments from Rhaze’s top videos. The comments were analysed through discourse analysis, paying special attention to the factors that influence digital media practices. The findings reveal that competing comments are shaped by postcolonial views on a gendered, racialized and class-based body in an interracial relationship. We then coin the term ‘online sisterhood’, reflecting the shared support that women nurture with other women through online practices. Ultimately, online sisterhood displays how Filipino women married to a white foreign national generate and negotiate spaces of mutual support in a neoliberal state. Paradoxically, a neoliberal government benefits from such cross-border and mediated mobility of Filipina migrants through the commodification of their everyday life. It is through this point that we argue for a closer evaluation of the role of ‘online sisterhoods’ in the construction of female subjectivity and imaginaries of mobility in the Global South.

scholarly journals The symbol of social media in contemporary protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652093374
Author(s):  
Olu Jenzen ◽  
Itir Erhart ◽  
Hande Eslen-Ziya ◽  
Umut Korkut ◽  
Aidan McGarry
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
Media Practices

This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. Extending the concept of media imaginaries to include analysis of protestors’ use of aesthetics, it aims to unpick how a particular ‘social media imaginary’ is constructed and informs their collective identity. Using the Gezi Park protest of 2013 as a case study, it illustrates how social media became a symbolic part of the protest movement by providing the visualised possibility of imagining the movement. In previous research, the main emphasis has been given to the functionality of social media as a means of information sharing and a tool for protest organisation. This article seeks to redress this by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in online protest expressions and thus also illustrates the role of visual analysis in social movement studies.

scholarly journals Digital media and the affective economies of transnational families

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 639-655 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raelene Wilding ◽  
Loretta Baldassar ◽  
Shashini Gamage ◽  
Shane Worrell ◽  
Samiro Mohamud
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Specific Role ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Media Practices

Digital media are widely recognised as essential to the maintenance of transnational families. To date, most accounts have focused on the role of digital media practices as producing and sustaining transnational relationships, through, for example, the practices of ‘digital kinning’. In this article, we extend that body of work by drawing attention to the specific role of the emotions that are circulated through digital media interactions and practices. We use data from ethnographic interviews with older migrant adults to consider how people who fled civil wars and resettled in Australia bridge the distances between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Our analysis draws attention to the circulation of affect, arguing that it is the capacity of digital media to circulate emotions and support affective economies that gives substance to and defines the surfaces and boundaries of transnational families, and constitutes the mutuality of being that underpins familyhood at a distance.

scholarly journals What is the role of depression in the discrepancy between estimated and actual iPhone use? An exploratory analysis using cubic response surface analysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Sewall ◽  
Douglas Parry
Keyword(s):  
Response Surface ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Surface Analysis ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Response Surface Analysis ◽  
Self Report ◽  
The Past ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Insight Into

The association between depression and digital media use has received substantial research and popular attention in recent years. While meta-analytic evidence indicates that there is a small, positive relationship between digital media use and depression, almost all studies rely on self-report measures of digital media use. Evidence suggests these measures are poor reflections of usage measures derived from digital trace data. Additionally, a recent study showed that the error in self-reported digital media use is likely biased systematically by factors that are fundamental to the effect being investigated: respondents’ volume of use and level of depression. The current exploratory study harnesses cubic response surface analysis—a novel analytical approach in this domain—to advance our understanding of how inaccuracies in self-report measures of digital media use can be explained by respondent attributes, in this case their level of depression and actual iPhone usage. A sample of 325 iPhone users provided estimates of their total iPhone use over the past week, their actual iPhone use as recorded by the Apple Screen Time application, and a measure of their depression (CESD-R-10). The results of the analysis indicate that depression is i.) more strongly associated with estimated than device-logged DMU; ii.) more associated with over-estimating than under-estimating of DMU; and iii.) more associated with inaccuracy at lower versus higher levels of DMU. The findings raise important questions concerning the validity of conclusions in this area and provide insight into the structure of measurement error in self-report estimates of digital media use.

Introduction: A Generation at Risk?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Ryan Vickery
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Young People ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Marginalized Youth ◽  
Media Narratives ◽  
Unequal Opportunities ◽  
Media Practices

This chapter asks: how do expectations of youth, technology, and risk shape policies, practices, and lived experiences? Through an analysis of harm-driven and opportunity-driven expectations, the chapter outlines key concerns related to young people’s digital media practices; specifically the ways privileged understandings of risk create unequal opportunities for marginalized youth. It identifies three disconnections that lead to fear. First, young people’s lived experiences with media differ from sensational fear-driven media narratives and policies. Second, the ways young people value media differ from how adults value digital media. Third, harm-driven narratives focus too overtly on the role of technology in young people’s lives, rather than broader social changes. The chapter aims to shift conversations away from harm and toward opportunity.

The Role of Digital and Social Media in Supporting Bereaved Students

2017 ◽  
pp. 96-112
Author(s):  
Carla J. Sofka
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Emotional Support ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Online Resources ◽  
Death Notification ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Tangible Assistance

This chapter describes the benefits and challenges that can occur with adolescents’ use of digital media and social media in relation to a death, beginning with the pros and cons of death notification via digital and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and texting. Digital and social media resources can be used to gain information about grief, to facilitate the provision of tangible assistance to the bereaved, and to offer emotional support. The use of social media as a tool for survivor advocacy will be discussed. Online resources available to facilitate cybersafety are covered. A list of questions to facilitate conversations with students about their use and impact of digital and social media use is included.

scholarly journals Smileys Without Borders. A Critique of Transboundary Interaction Between Politicians, Journalists and PR Practitioners on Social Media

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34
Author(s):  
Peter Berglez
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Professional Boundaries ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
The Common

The purpose of the article is to contribute a critical theoretical understanding of cross-professional relations on social media, focusing on politicians, journalists and PR practitioners. It is well known that these professional groups establish personal and close relations in offline contexts, but more attention needs to be paid to the role of social media. Here, it is argued that, in the context of digital media use, semi-private chatting, humour, and mutual acknowledgement, including the use of likes, smileys, heart symbols, etc. are evidence of a 'neoliberalization' of cross-professional relations. The underlying idea is that the common practice of self-branding undermines representations of professional belonging and exacerbates the blurring of professional boundaries. The critical conceptualization of such 'transboundary' interaction between politicians, journalists and PR practitioners, which is guided by a cultural materialist approach, includes the presentation of examples deriving from the Swedish Twittersphere, and suggestions for empirical research.

scholarly journals While ‘Gramming’ a Wedding in India: Media and the Reproduction of a ‘Bridal Femininity’

Tripodos ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 147-167
Author(s):  
Athira B K
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Digital Ethnography ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Media Practices

This paper examines the changing wedding scenes and performance of bridehood in India in a post-liberalisation period. The study, based on a digital ethnography, explores the changing wedding practices by considering the role of digital media in circulating and reifying the image of an emergent bridehood, tethering it to the ideology of consumption as well as distinctions based on social categories like gender and religion. It looks into the possibility of a scheme that goes beyond the narrative of ‘uniformisation’ in explaining the changes manifested in the performance of bridehood in the Eastern and Western regions of India, with an expansion of social media practices in the recent years.

scholarly journals Smileys Without Borders. A Critique of Transboundary Interaction Between Politicians, Journalists and PR Practitioners on Social Media

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Berglez
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Professional Boundaries ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
The Common

The purpose of the article is to contribute a critical theoretical understanding of cross-professional relations on social media, focusing on politicians, journalists and PR practitioners. It is well known that these professional groups establish personal and close relations in offline contexts, but more attention needs to be paid to the role of social media. Here, it is argued that, in the context of digital media use, semi-private chatting, humour, and mutual acknowledgement, including the use of likes, smileys, heart symbols, etc. are evidence of a 'neoliberalization' of cross-professional relations. The underlying idea is that the common practice of self-branding undermines representations of professional belonging and exacerbates the blurring of professional boundaries. The critical conceptualization of such 'transboundary' interaction between politicians, journalists and PR practitioners, which is guided by a cultural materialist approach, includes the presentation of examples deriving from the Swedish Twittersphere, and suggestions for empirical research.

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