scholarly journals ‘Smash the patriarchy’: the changing meanings and work of ‘patriarchy’ online

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-189
Author(s):  
Rosemary Lucy Hill ◽  
Kim Allen
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The 1960S

This article discusses the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture and reflects on the everyday online meanings of the term in distinction to academic theorisations. In the 1960s–1980s, feminists theorised patriarchy as the systematic oppression of women, with differing approaches to how it worked. Criticisms that the concept was unable to account for intersectional experiences of oppression, alongside the ‘turn to culture’, resulted in a fall from academic grace. However, ‘patriarchy’ has found new life through Internet memes (humorous, mutational images that circulate widely on social media). This article aims to investigate the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture. Based on an analysis of memes with the phrase ‘patriarchy’ and ‘smash the patriarchy’, we identify how patriarchy memes are used by two different online communities (feminists and anti-feminists) and consider what this means for the ongoing usefulness of the concept of patriarchy. We argue that, whilst performing important community-forming work, using the term is a risky strategy for feminists for two reasons: first, because memes are by their nature brief, there is little opportunity to address intersections of oppression; secondly, the underlying logic of feminism is omitted in favour of brevity, leaving it exposed to being undermined by the more mainstream logic of masculinism.

Newspaper Confessions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Golia
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Chat Rooms ◽  
Newspaper Industry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Virtual Interactions

Newspaper Confessions chronicles the history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans’ relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous yet public forum. The columns are important—and overlooked—precursors to today’s digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other. This book charts the rise of the advice column and its impact on the newspaper industry. It analyzes the advice given in a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. It shows how advice columnists were forerunners to the modern celebrity journalist, while also serving as educators to audience of millions. This book includes in-depth case studies of specific columns, demonstrating how these forums transformed into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy.

scholarly journals Digital Culture and Social Media versus the Traditional Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-205
Author(s):  
Agim Poshka
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Traditional Education ◽  
The Self ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Public Pedagogy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
The Everyday

This article aims to refl ect on the increasing momentum that social media have in the everyday life our students and to investigate the uniqueness that this media offers to the process of education. The study investigates the benefi ts that Facebook and Twitter have as the leading technologically mediated spaces and its application to the learning habitat of the learner in the public pedagogy. The article refl ects on the opportunities that social media offers in order to avoid the self-created intellectual chamber by allowing educators to share and challenge ideas and concepts through the so called non-traditional “great spare time revolution”.

scholarly journals Mediated friendship: Online and offline alliances in girls’ everyday lives in Italy

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1S) ◽  
pp. 100S-115S
Author(s):  
Arianna Mainardi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Network Sites ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Female Relationships ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Use Of Social Media

This article engages with the current debate on feminisms and digital media by looking at the tension between individualism and collective action. Drawing on an empirical research project involving girls, carried out in Italy and focusing on female processes of subjectivation in a postfeminist new media context, it will discuss constraints and opportunities shaped by the everyday use of social media. The article places itself in the latest trend of cyberfeminist studies, by analysing friendship relationships developed among girls in and through digital media. It also looks at how the mediated nature of social network sites offers room for the building of alliances among girls, and how this challenges online and offline gender norms. In doing so, the article reflects on the way female relationships change and are reworked in digital culture, thus giving a new meaning to the feminist concept of sisterhood.

Mod Pop Methods

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
Quinlan Miller
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Trans Content ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Television Industry ◽  
Production Studies ◽  
Feminist Media Studies ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Gender Regulation

This article reconstructs queer popular culture as a way of exploring media production studies as a trans history project. It argues that queer and trans insights into gender are indispensible to feminist media studies. The article looks at The Ugliest Girl in Town series (ABC, 1968–69), a satire amplifying a purported real-life fad in flat chests, short haircuts, and mod wigs, to restore texture to the everyday landscape of popular entertainment. Approaching camp as a genderqueer practice, the article presents the program as one of many indications of simultaneously queer and trans representation in the new media moment of the late 1960s. Behind-the-scenes visions of excavated archival research inform an analysis of the series as a feminist text over and against its trans misogyny, which evaluates and ranks women based on their looks, bodies, and appearance while excessively sexualizing and even more stringently appraising, policing, and punishing trans women, women perceived to be trans, and oppositional forms of femininity. The program captures both the means of gender regulation and detachment from it, the experience of gender embodiment, and the promise of presenting and being perceived as many genders. Ugly is an awful word in the way it is usually wielded, but it can be reclaimed. Examining this rarely cited and often misconstrued Screen Gems series helps to demonstrate a more equitable distribution of creative credit for queer trans content across the television industry and the subcultures it commodified in the 1960s.

Concrete Monsters of the Welfare State: Discussions of Brutalist Architecture on Social Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 120633122110193
Author(s):  
Max Holleran
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Welfare State

Brutalist architecture is an object of fascination on social media that has taken on new popularity in recent years. This article, drawing on 3,000 social media posts in Russian and English, argues that the buildings stand out for their arresting scale and their association with the expanding state in the 1960s and 1970s. In both North Atlantic and Eastern European contexts, the aesthetic was employed in publicly financed urban planning projects, creating imposing concrete structures for universities, libraries, and government offices. While some online social media users associate the style with the overreach of both socialist and capitalist governments, others are more nostalgic. They use Brutalist buildings as a means to start conversations about welfare state goals of social housing, free university, and other services. They also lament that many municipal governments no longer have the capacity or vision to take on large-scale projects of reworking the built environment to meet contemporary challenges.

scholarly journals Profiles, Identities, Data: Making Abundant and Anchored Selves in a Platform Society

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukasz Szulc
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Social Media Platforms

AbstractThe practice of profile making has become ubiquitous in digital culture. Internet users are regularly invited, and usually required, to create a profile for a plethora of digital media, including mega social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Understanding profiles as a set of identity performances, I argue that the platforms employ profiles to enable and incentivize particular ways and foreclose other ways of self-performance. Drawing on research into digital media and identities, combined with mediatization theories, I show how the platforms: (a) embrace datafication logic (gathering as much data as possible and pinpointing the data to a particular unit); (b) translate the logic into design and governance of profiles (update stream and profile core); and (c) coax—at times coerce—their users into making of abundant but anchored selves, that is, performing identities which are capacious, complex, and volatile but singular and coherent at the same time.

scholarly journals The banality of WhatsApp: On the everyday politics of backstage activism in Mexico and Spain

First Monday ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emiliano Treré
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Negative Side ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Politics ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

Drawing on interviews with social movements and organizations in Mexico and Spain, this paper sheds light on the dynamics of ‘backstage activism’ with a focus on WhatsApp. It illustrates how activists have integrated this app into their media ecologies to reinforce collective identity, cement internal solidarity and lower the pressure of protest. It shows that within WhatsApp groups, campaigners have countered the paranoia experienced in the frontstage of social media exchanging ironical material and intimate messages. It demonstrates that WhatsApp has been used as a robust organizational device and it is now firmly integrated into the mechanisms of organizations and movements. Its communicative affordances (speed, reliability, mobility, multimediality) in conjunction with the omnipresent smartphone are often emphasized. Nuancing characterizations that tend to either disregard its role or stress its negative side, this qualitative exploration foregrounds the banality of WhatsApp. This article unpacks the multiple roles of this app within the submerged practices of movements and organizations.

scholarly journals Social Media, Peer Surveillance, Spiritual Formation, and Mission: Practising Christian Faith in a Surveilled Public Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-532
Author(s):  
Bex Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Spiritual Formation ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
The Individual

Social media has become a part of everyday life, including the faith lives of many. It is a space that assumes an observing gaze. Engaging with Foucauldian notions of surveillance, self-regulation, and normalisation, this paper considers what it is about social and digital culture that shapes expectations of what users can or want to do in online spaces. Drawing upon a wide range of surveillance research, it reflects upon what “surveillance” looks like within social media, especially when users understand themselves to be observed in the space. Recognising moral panics around technological development, the paper considers the development of social norms and questions how self-regulation by users presents itself within a global population. Focusing upon the spiritual formation of Christian users (disciples) in an online environment as a case study of a community of practice, the paper draws particularly upon the author’s experiences online since 1997 and material from The Big Bible Project (CODEC 2010–2015). The research demonstrates how the lived experience of the individual establishes the interconnectedness of the online and offline environments. The surveillant affordances and context collapse are liberating for some users but restricting for others in both their faith formation and the subsequent imperative to mission.

scholarly journals Social Media and the Hermeneutics of Participation in the Digital Culture

UNITAS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-171
Author(s):  
Oscar R. Diamante
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Culture
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