Weibo and the making of Chinese networked publics: Witness, debates and expertise

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Le Han
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
State Control ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Content Creation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Major Transformation ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Networked Publics

Through the analysis of the online discourses about Weibo in the past and present, this article examines how the platform has taken part in the shaping of Chinese networked publics and public participation as it has been undergoing three stages of development itself: collective witness, ideological contention, and networks of expertise. The three stages reflect a major transformation of social media and digital culture in China, from the civic-minded public engagement and activism to the celebration of individual online fame and monetization of content creation. This transformation is taking place at the tightening state control of digital media, suggesting a blurring boundary between corporate and public interests under such circumstance.

scholarly journals Pushing the Next Level: Investigating Digital Content Creation in India

2019 ◽  
pp. 152747641986169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Smith Mehta ◽  
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Digital Content ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Online Content ◽  
Content Creation ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Export Product

Film, television, and music form a major domestic and export product in India. Whereas, in the past, content production has been restricted to professional producers, digital media platforms have drastically altered the landscape of content production in India. Through in-depth interviews of ten online content creators, the article describes motivations of online content creation in India. Discussion themes include professional activities, identity construction of creators, and quasi-corporate structures that are taking root in the democratized digital spaces in India. In doing so, the article challenges the notion of creators on social media as mere “amateurs” or “UGC” (user-generated content). Conclusions from this study suggest future research should take a more holistic approach to studying online content creators rather than classifying creators on the basis of platform affordances.

scholarly journals A Topology of Twitter Tactics: Tracing the Rhetorical Dimensions and Digital Labor of Networked Publics

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110255
Author(s):  
Paige Alfonzo
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The United States ◽  
Communication Styles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Patterns Of Communication ◽  
Political Conversation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Networked Publics

This study draws from the broad range of cross-disciplinary theories examining digitally networked action (DNA) to offer a rhetorical topology that traces the repeated patterns of communication and digital actions marking the formation and maintenance of protest counterpublics. Grounded in the concepts of collective identity building and network theory, the rhetorical characteristics and digital tactics that scholars have uncovered over the past 10 years were synthesized into a series of a priori classifications (i.e., topoi). These topoi were then applied to the exploration of how Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists used Twitter in service of protest. While the topoi constituting the topology guided the analysis, this study also details the unique and contextually specific personalized communication styles, protest action approaches, and digital affordances used by BLM advocates to constitute a movement that has brought the persistent oppression of Black individuals living in the United States to the forefront of political conversation. This approach sheds light on the elements contributing to the subject positions that encouraged others to commit to BLM as well as provides a resource for those seeking to integrate unified findings from studies focused on the nexus of digital media and social movements in their work.

Evidently Married: Changing Ambiguities in Creating Family Ties in Morocco

Hawwa ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 34-54
Author(s):  
Annerienke Fioole
Keyword(s):  
Penal Code ◽  
State Control ◽  
Legal Recognition ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Contract ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Over Time

Abstract What does it take for a couple to stand out as married to others? In Morocco, an ideal scenario to marry today involves families celebrating three stages: an engagement, a legal contract, and a wedding. Yet, as I will show, couples may also turn out to be married without such ceremonies. Other elements can make for evident marriages. Still, legal recognition has, over the past decades, become increasingly essential within people’s own creations of conjugal bonds. Moreover, family and penal code revisions, together with the civil registry’s expansion, have profoundly changed proceedings and possibilities to legally marry. These processes defy simple binaries of legal versus licit domains. Legal and licit understandings of marriage interlace both in people’s own evaluations and in state officials’ approaches. However, as I will argue, increased emphasis on legal registration also heightens state control over family ties and reduces people’s opportunities to leave marital definitions open-ended as this suits them over time.

scholarly journals Affordances of Digital Archives: The Case of the Prozhito Archive of Personal Diaries

2020 ◽  
pp. 371-387
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Kalinina
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Public Access ◽  
Digital Archive ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digital Media Studies

With regard to increasing politicization and instrumentalization of history in Russia and the development of digital tools allowing public access to previously non-available historical documents, analysis of digital platforms exhibiting potential for engagement with the past becomes of relevance to Russian and Digital Media Studies. Therefore this chapter focuses on a Russian case study Prozhito, a digital archive of personal diaries created by a community of volunteers. Being an example of public engagement with the past, Prozhito, nevertheless, has a number of constraints that raise ethical, political and techno-methodological questions concerning archival composition and affordances of the platform for participation. Therefore the aim of this chapter is to study Prozhito’s affordances to learn more about the potentials of such platforms for the production of historical knowledge.

scholarly journals Humor in Historical Memory: from an Anecdote and Caricature to an Internet Meme

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-237
Author(s):  
Denis S. Artamonov
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
The Media

The article is devoted to the study of the role of anecdotes, caricatures and Internet memes in the construction of historical memory. The memory of the past implies emotional content, the expression of which is often humor. The author views an anecdote as a component of oral history and a communication phenomenon of the pre-digital era, in which the representation of ideas about the past was humorous. A historical anecdote, being originally a kind of didactic historiography, has been transformed into a tool for transmitting an informal interpretation of history, and once in the digital media environment, it has lost its former meaning. Mass media, with the help of a caricature representing history in a humorous way, have visualized the images of the past, setting certain evaluative frameworks of historical and political events. Being an element of traditional media as well as a work of art, caricature encouraged the formation of historical memory along with other artistic genres. In the digital age, it, like a historical anecdote, has given way to Internet memes in the media sphere. The author considers Internet memes to be the phenomena of digital culture, defining them as a kind of a polymodal, metaphorical, often ironic, humorous utterance that is spread in the media environment. A historical Internet meme, combining the images of popular culture and collective memory in a visual text format, has a decisive influence on the perception of historical events and personalities by social media audiences. With the help of Internet memes a great number of Internet users create their own versions of the interpretation of history in a humorous form, thus reproducing the collectively shared mythologized ideas about the past.

Education with Digital Culture: Shifting the Paradigms of Prospective Knowledge by Mediatization

MedienJournal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Gudrun Marci-Boehncke ◽  
Matthias Rath
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
School Education ◽  
Media Education ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Selection Mechanism ◽  
Competency Frameworks

This article presents the paradigm shift, especially in school education, under the conditions of current mediatization, whereby we understand education initially as a communicative system that is dedicated to the acquisition of new and future relevant knowledge in lifelong processes of appropriation. To this end, educational institutions demand an educational language that screens out those who cannot serve that linguistic register. Arguing with regard to Rawls and Nussbaum, we present this selection mechanism under the conditions of current mediatization as both ideologically outdated and practically reducible and refer to current models of professionalization of teachers and international competency frameworks for digital media education.

scholarly journals Scientific literacy, public engagement and responsibility in science

2021 ◽  
pp. 209660832110096
Author(s):  
Daya Reddy
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Genome Editing ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Scientific Literacy ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Global Public Good ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Responsibility Of Scientists

This work addresses the issue of scientific literacy and its connection to the responsibility of scientists in relation to public engagement. The points of departure are, first, the notion of science as a global public good, and, second, developments in the past few decades driven largely by the digital revolution. The latter lend a particular urgency to initiatives aimed at promoting scientific literacy. Arguments are presented for reassessing approaches to public communication. The particular example of genome editing is provided as a vehicle for highlighting the challenges in engagement involving the scientific community, policymakers and broader society.

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 Game Studies meets Surveillance Studies at the Edge of Digital Culture: An Introduction to a special issue on Surveillance, Games and Play

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Whitson ◽  
Bart Simon
Keyword(s):  
Data Gathering ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Finite Range ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Sorting ◽  
The Relationship

While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared military roots, in this editorial we argue that the relationship goes much deeper to that. Even non-digital games such as chess require a mode of watchfulness: an attention to each piece in relation to the past, present, and future; a drive to predict an opponent’s movements; and, a distillation of the player-subject into a knowable finite range of possible actions defined by the rules. Games are social sorting, disciplinary, social control machines.In this introduction we tease apart some of the intersections of games and surveillance, beginning with a discussion of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden on using games to both monitor and influence unsuspecting populations. Next, we provide an overview of corporate data-gathering practices in games and further outline the production of manageable, computable subjectivities. Then, we show how the game Watch Dogs explores the surveillant capacities of games at both the game mechanical and representational scales. These three different facets of surveillance, games, and play set the scene for the special issue and the diverse articles that follow.  In the following pages we pose new lines of questioning that highlight the nuances of play and offer new modes of thinking about what games - and the processes of watching and being watched that are a foundational part of the experience – can tell us about surveillance.

scholarly journals Integrating Digital Datasets into Public Engagement through ArcGIS StoryMaps

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-360
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Howland ◽  
Brady Liss ◽  
Thomas E. Levy ◽  
Mohammad Najjar
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
First Century ◽  
Copper Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Archaeological Methods ◽  
Three Dimensional Models

AbstractArchaeologists have a responsibility to use their research to engage people and provide opportunities for the public to interact with cultural heritage and interpret it on their own terms. This can be done through hypermedia and deep mapping as approaches to public archaeology. In twenty-first-century archaeology, scholars can rely on vastly improved technologies to aid them in these efforts toward public engagement, including digital photography, geographic information systems, and three-dimensional models. These technologies, even when collected for analysis or documentation, can be valuable tools for educating and involving the public with archaeological methods and how these methods help archaeologists learn about the past. Ultimately, academic storytelling can benefit from making archaeological results and methods accessible and engaging for stakeholders and the general public. ArcGIS StoryMaps is an effective tool for integrating digital datasets into an accessible framework that is suitable for interactive public engagement. This article describes the benefits of using ArcGIS StoryMaps for hypermedia and deep mapping–based public engagement using the story of copper production in Iron Age Faynan, Jordan, as a case study.

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