‘My favourite meme page’: Balenciaga’s Instagram account and audience fashion labour online

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Synne Skjulstad
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Fashion Brand ◽  
Visual Identity ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
Boundary Maintenance ◽  
Online Audiences ◽  
Media Logic ◽  
Heuristic Device

As fashion ‘goes viral’, adapting to digital popular cultural flows, streams, image aggregations and memes, there is a need for better grasping how these platforms feed into the aesthetics of mediations of fashion. Contemporary digitally mediated fashion is conditioned by what van Dijck and Poell refer to as a new media logic, one that permeates the ‘strategies, mechanisms, and economics underpinning these platforms’ dynamics’. This logic includes audience labour. This article focuses on how the audience is put to work and how such work becomes integral to the mediational aesthetic by using the Instagram account of Paris-based fashion brand Balenciaga as a heuristic device. In connecting perspectives from fashion and media studies, this article discusses how fashion mediation is entangled in processes that harness audience labour on Instagram. Balenciaga takes on communication strategies that expose the aesthetics of user engagement. On Instagram, the brand presents its take on fashion photography in the digital age as part of its visual identity on this platform. Furthermore, in feeding the comments section, users participate in ‘boundary maintenance’, separating Balenciaga insiders from outsiders who lack knowledge of the perpetually changing aesthetic codes of fashion imagery. Online audiences thus find themselves at the crossroads of consumption, production and gatekeeping.

The End of Media

2017 ◽  
pp. 20-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andréa Belliger ◽  
David John Krieger
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Network Society ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Media Convergence ◽  
Actor Network

In the network society and the age of media convergence, media production can no longer be isolated into channels, formats, technologies, and organizations. Media Studies is facing the challenge to reconceptualize its foundations. It could therefore be claimed that new media are the last media. In the case of digital versus analog, there is no continuity between new media and old media. A new and promising proposal has come from German scholars who attempt the precarious balance between media theory and a general theory of mediation based on Actor-Network Theory. Under the title of Actor-Media Theory (Akteur-Medien-Theorie) these thinkers attempt to reformulate the program of Media Studies beyond assumptions of social or technical determinism. Replacing Actor-Network Theory with Actor-Media Theory raises the question of whether exchanging the concept of “network” for the concept of “media” is methodologically and theoretically advantageous.

Toward a Framework/Data Model

2011 ◽  
pp. 217-233
Author(s):  
Franc Feng
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Complex Networks ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Data Model ◽  
Graduate Courses ◽  
Teaching Online ◽  
New Model ◽  
New Media Studies

In this exploratory contribution, the author proposes a framework for re-mapping ePortfolio research around an emergent model of engagement with information. Through an anthropological lens, he casts ePortfolio implementation within communities of practice in complex networks of actors, artifacts, and flows. His work surveys extant approaches in the ePortfolio research, identifying gaps in the literature, towards an inclusive framework around a new model reflecting the changing relationship with information, grounding the theorizing in his practice, designing and teaching online graduate courses in Cultural and New Media Studies in Education.

scholarly journals Gaali cultures: The politics of abusive exchange on social media

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 1506-1522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahana Udupa
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Online Abuse ◽  
New Media Studies

On the rapidly expanding social media in India, online users are witness to a routine exchange of abusive terms and accusations with choicest swearwords hurled even for the seemingly non-inflammatory political debates. This article draws upon anthropology of insult to uncover the distinctness, if at all, of online abuse as a means for political participation as well as for the encumbering it provokes and relations of domination it reproduces as a result. In so doing, the article critiques the conception of ludic as anti-hegemonic in the Bakhtin tradition, and develops an emic term “gaali” to signal the blurred boundaries between comedy, insult, shame, and abuse emerging on online media, which also incite gendered forms of intimidation. Gaali, it argues, is best conceptualized through the metaphor of “sound” as distinct from what recent new media studies theorize as “voice.”

Thought Beats: New Technology, Music Video and Media Education

2006 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
Steve Archer
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Classroom Management ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Media Education ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Dominant Feature

This paper has as its focus two key strands that are significant to contemporary media education. The first is the increasing move towards creative production work as the central and dominant feature of media studies courses. In UK schools, this has largely been facilitated by the rapid expansion of digital technologies. Whilst this offers unprecedented opportunities for students to construct advanced and highly polished artefacts, it has also created new challenges for the media teacher in relation to pedagogy and classroom management. The second strand is the emergence of globalised, commercial media cultures and their relation to new media forms facilitated by digital technology. Here, this paper is interested in the relatively new media form of the music video which, in its dominant mode of distribution and exhibition, exists globally as part of satellite and digital packages. Music video as a form is ideal for use in Media Studies as an object of study and as a framework for facilitating creative work. Based on practitioner research methods, this paper teases out the tensions that exist between popular culture, media education and digital technology, incorporating the way a sense of community located beyond the school can create opportunities for student creative work.

Urban Mediation and Mobility in Istanbul

Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-136
Author(s):  
Dorit Müller
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
European Network ◽  
European Capital Of Culture ◽  
Ample Opportunity ◽  
Extensive Analysis ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Film And Media Studies

The European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) held its fifth annual conference “Urban Mediations” from June 24 to 27, 2010 in the European Capital of Culture 2010, Istanbul. A wide variety of scholars and researchers in the field of cinema, film, and media studies, but also archivists or film and media professionals were invited. The broad scope theme of “urban mediations” provided ample opportunity for extensive analysis and discussion of media and urbanity theories by the attendees. In more than 80 panels, with four talks each, various questions could be discussed. For example: How are city spaces represented and created in different media? What urban practices and aesthetics develop when using “media”? To what extent do new media forms influence future urban developments or make them possible in the first place? How does media shape city-human interaction?

scholarly journals From hanging out to figuring it out: Socializing online as a pathway to computational thinking

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482092367
Author(s):  
Samantha Shorey ◽  
Benjamin Mako Hill ◽  
Samuel Woolley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Computational Thinking ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Youth Engagement ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
Multi Stage ◽  
Media Environments ◽  
Stage Analysis ◽  
Over Time

Although socializing is a powerful driver of youth engagement online, platforms struggle to leverage social engagement to promote learning. We seek to understand this dynamic using a multi-stage analysis of over 14,000 comments on Scratch, an online platform designed to support learning about programming. First, we inductively develop the concept of “participatory debugging”—a practice in which users learn through the process of collaborative technical troubleshooting. Second, we use a content analysis to establish how common the practice is on Scratch. Third, we conduct a qualitative analysis of user activity over time and identify three factors that serve as social antecedents of participatory debugging: (1) sustained community, (2) identifiable problems, and (3) what we call “topic porousness” to describe conversations that are able to span multiple topics. We integrate these findings in a framework that highlights a productive tension between the desire to promote learning and the interest-driven sub-communities that drive user engagement in many new media environments.

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