Facebook and cultural identity: Discourses on mediation among international students

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322
Author(s):  
Delia Dumitrica
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Identity Discourses ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
Four Discourses

Abstract Digital mediation is implicated in the production of cultural identity in multiple ways. The representations produced and circulated on social media platforms, along with the ubiquitous nature of these platforms, become part and parcel of the production and performance of cultural identity. This paper investigates discourses of Facebook mediation and cultural identity among a sample of international undergraduates in media and communication at a major Dutch university. The analysis of 43 written student essays reveals four discourses: Facebook as a mirror of cultural identity, as a cultural mosaic, as a site of cultural difference and as an opportunity for critical reflection on the idea of cultural identity. Interestingly, these discourses are permeated by a recurrent vision of individual control of both mediation and cultural identity. This article discusses the ideological work entailed in these discourses, calling for more awareness raising on the ways in which social media actively construct social reality.

scholarly journals For lack of a better word: neo-identities in non-cisgender, non-straight communities on Tumblr

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Feraday
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site

Non-cisgender and non-straight identity language has long been a site of contention and evolution. There has been an increase in new non-cisgender, non-straight identity words since the creation of the internet, thanks to social media platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr in particular has been host to many conversations about identity and self-naming, though these conversations have not yet been the subject of much academic research. Through interviews and analysis of Tumblr posts, this thesis examines the emergence of new identity words, or neo-identities, used by non-cisgender and non-straight users of Tumblr. The work presents neo-identities as strategies for resisting and challenging cisheteronormative conceptions of gender and attraction, as well as sources of comfort and relief for non-cisgender/non-straight people who feel ‘broken’ and excluded from mainstream identity categories. This thesis also posits that Tumblr is uniquely suited for conversations about identity because of its potential for self-expression, community, and anonymity.

Pushing Back, Through Media and Civil Society

Hate Spin ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherian George
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Social Media Platforms

How a society responds to hate spin depends on not only its laws, but also its social norms—in particular, whether people consider bigotry to be socially acceptable or something to fight against, how comfortable they are with ideas and beliefs that are different, and whether their sense of national belonging is based on inclusive democratic values or an exclusive cultural identity. This chapter examines the role of non-state actors in shaping societies’ responses to hate spin. These players—secular and religious civil society groups, news organizations, and social media platforms, for example—are essential parts of any effort to build democracies that are respectful of religious differences. But, like state policy, media and civil society organizations are also often part of the problem, facilitating, encouraging, or even generating hate spin.

Cultural Identity Preservation Through Social Media

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurhayat Bilge
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Identity Negotiation ◽  
Cultural Preservation ◽  
Identity Preservation ◽  
Shared History ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Media Platforms

This chapter explores cultural identity negotiation on social media for a specific refugee group. Previous research indicates the importance of a sense of community and cultural preservation in regards to establishing and maintaining a cultural identity for this specific group. The group, Meskhetian Turks, is an example of ethnic identity and an established ethnicity through shared history and struggle. This chapter focuses on the virtual implications of the group's identity in social media. More specifically, it explores how social media platforms serve as a cultural unifier, where cultural identity is maintained and perpetuated in the face of an unattainable physical homeland.

scholarly journals Gender of the Interface

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Kraemer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Interaction Design ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Visually Based ◽  
A Site ◽  
Modes Of Interaction ◽  
Media Practices

For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.

scholarly journals REDDIT QUARANTINED: CONSEQUENCES OF DEALING WITH DISTRUST IN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS THROUGH RESTRICTING ENGAGEMENT

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Copland
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Activity Levels ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Social Media Site ◽  
Online Abuse ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
A Site

Online abuse has become a matter of trust for social media platforms, whose role as a facilitator of public debate has been called into question. In response social media companies have become more active in regulating and banning particular users and channels. Through the use of affordances theory, this paper examines one example of the regulation of content on a social media site, the revamp of the quarantining function on Reddit in late 2018. Quarantines are designed to halt participation within and growth of subreddits without banning them outright. The paper uses quantitative and qualitative data to examine the consequences of this revamp on two subreddits, r/Braincels and r/TheRedPill. Through studying activity levels on these subreddits the paper argues that quarantines did limit discussion within these subreddits. However, it also argues that the revamp had unintended consequences, in particular a growth in distrust between subreddit users and Reddit as a site, and a shift of users away from Reddit to less regulated sites. The paper argues that quarantining shifted the affordances of Reddit, in this instance resulting in greater discouragement of activity on particular subreddits. Using the mechanisms and conditions framework (Davis and Chouinard, 2016) the paper however argues that users adapted to and circumvented this discouragement to continue engaging in particular behavior. While quarantining had short term benefits, using an affordances framework this paper argues it had unintended consequences, ones which can result in a continued radicalization of actions and beliefs, furthering distrust in the online sphere.

scholarly journals Effects of Indian Cartoons on Pakistani Children

2018 ◽  
Vol I (I) ◽  
pp. 15-25
Author(s):  
Khadija Maqsood
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
The Future ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Common ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Hindi Language ◽  
The Impact

This study is conducted to assess the impact of Indian Cartoons on Pakistani children. For this purpose, the survey was conducted among the common citizens of Pakistan. In total 50 participants took part in the survey. It has been established that the major impacts of Indian Cartoons include children adopting foreign cultural traits, adopting Hindi language and diverting away from Religion to some extent. These impacts can become harmful in future if the foreign traits adopted by children get cemented. These children are the future of Pakistan. If they do not stick to their original cultural identity, then in few years the distinct identity of Pakistan will be lost. Even when the cartoons are banned from Pakistani channels, still they are present on social media platforms like Youtube. Parents must ensure that their children do not watch Indian cartoons. Only then we will be able to save our culture.

Bilingual brand communities? Strategies for targeting Hispanics on social media

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dino A. Villegas ◽  
Alejandra Marin Marin
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Customer Engagement ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
The Impact

Purpose This paper aims to explore different strategies used by brands to target the Hispanic market via social media from the lens of the Spanish language in a multicultural country like the USA. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a netnographic approach by drawing information from a study of the Facebook pages of 11 brands belonging to different industries. Findings Companies engage in four levels of cultural identity adaptation using different strategies based on ethnicity: language adaptation, identity elements, identity matching and Latino persona. The study also shows that merely translating Facebook pages do not generate high levels of communitarian interaction. Practical implications This study examines different strategies used by brands in the USA to target the Hispanic audience on social media to provide insights for brand managers to develop online engagement. Originality/value With the increase in cultural diversity in different countries and the rise of social media platforms, brand researchers need to better understand how cultural identity permeates marketing strategies in online spaces. Social media platforms such as Facebook offer flexible environments where strategies beyond product- and brand-related aspects can be used. This study extends the literature by showing the heterogeneity of cultural identity-based strategies used by companies to ensure customer engagement and brand loyalty and the impact of such strategies on users.

scholarly journals Keeping Fit in the Smog: Health, Self-Tracking and Air Pollution in Post-socialist China

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Liu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Air Pollution ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Embodied Self

This article concerns the relation between health, the embodied self-tracking subject and the environment in postsocialist China. Instead of simply expanding the framework of neoliberal subject to the question of health and the phenomenon of tracking and sharing data of “smog jog” in the Chinese context, this article addresses the following two inter-related questions: (1) how might an investigation of the practices of self-tracking “smog jog” in the context of postsocialist china afford a reconsideration of health; (2) how might an examination of the ways in which health is interpreted, performed and negotiated through practices of monitoring, measuring and recording a jog and the air quality in postsocialist China rework the conception of self-tracking. This article examines posts on Sina Weibo, which is one of the most popular social media platforms in China, in which Weibo users record and describe their jog in the smog. It argues that the configuration and performance of health and the embodied self-tracking subjects are multiple, and are informed by, negotiated with and find expressions in the environment in postsocialist China.

scholarly journals Digital detritus: 'Error' and the logic of opacity in social media content moderation

First Monday ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah T. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Vietnam Era ◽  
The Status ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Lead Users ◽  
The One ◽  
A Site ◽  
Moderation Process

The late 2016 case of the Facebook content moderation controversy over the infamous Vietnam-era photo, “The Terror of War,” is examined in this paper for both its specifics, as well as a mechanism to engage in a larger discussion of the politics and economics of the content moderation of user-generated content. In the context of mainstream commercial social media platforms, obfuscation and secrecy work together to form an operating logic of opacity, a term and concept introduced in this paper. The lack of clarity around platform policies, procedures and the values that inform them lead users to wildly different interpretations of the user experience on the same site, resulting in confusion in no small part by the platforms’ own design. Platforms operationalize their content moderation practices under a complex web of nebulous rules and procedural opacity, while governments and other actors clamor for tighter controls on some material, and other members of civil society demand greater freedoms for online expression. Few parties acknowledge the fact that mainstream social media platforms are already highly regulated, albeit rarely in such a way that can be satisfactory to all. The final turn in the paper connects the functions of the commercial content moderation process on social media platforms like Facebook to their output, being either the content that appears on a site, or content that is rescinded: digital detritus. While meaning and intent of user-generated content may often be imagined to be the most important factors by which content is evaluated for a site, this paper argues that its value to the platform as a potentially revenue-generating commodity is actually the key criterion and the one to which all moderation decisions are ultimately reduced. The result is commercialized online spaces that have far less to offer in terms of political and democratic challenge to the status quo and which, in fact, may serve to reify and consolidate power rather than confront it.

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