scholarly journals The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Marwick ◽  
danah boyd
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Relational Aggression ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Interpersonal Conflict ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Soap Operas ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Networked Publics

While teenage conflict is nothing new, today’s gossip, jokes, and arguments often play out through social media like Formspring, Twitter, and Facebook. Although adults often refer to these practices with the language of “bullying,” teens are more likely to refer to the resultant skirmishes and their digital traces as “drama.” Drama is a performative set of actions distinct from bullying, gossip, and relational aggression, incorporating elements of them but also operating quite distinctly. While drama is not particularly new, networked dynamics reconfigure how drama plays out and what it means to teens in new ways. In this paper, we examine how American teens conceptualize drama, its key components, participant motivations for engaging in it, and its relationship to networked technologies. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, we examine what drama means to teenagers and its relationship to visibility and privacy. We argue that the emic use of “drama” allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency - and save face - rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative. Drama is a gendered process that perpetrates conventional gender norms. It also reflects discourses of celebrity, particularly the mundane interpersonal conflict found on soap operas and reality television. For teens, sites like Facebook allow for similar performances in front of engaged audiences. Understanding how “drama” operates is necessary to recognize teens’ own defenses against the realities of aggression, gossip, and bullying in networked publics.

‘Reality’ Television Critique in Israel: How ‘Quality’ Became ‘Morality’

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noa Lavie
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Soap Operas ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Popular Television

‘Reality’ television is a global and highly popular television phenomenon. Despite its public and academic critique as cultural ‘trash’, the genre enjoys great economic legitimacy. In recent years, other ‘trashy’ television genres, such as soap operas, have gained aesthetic-artistic legitimacy alongside their economic legitimacy. Taking a Bourdieusian approach and using the discourse about Israeli ‘reality’ shows as a case study, this article addresses the question of whether a similar process is evident in television critics’ attitudes towards reality television. Using quantitative and qualitative content analysis of reviews of ‘reality’ shows between 2003 and 2014, the article shows that the main question debated in such reviews is the genre’s morality rather than its aesthetic value: for Israeli critics, it is the moral attributes of these shows, not their aesthetic or artistic worth, which determine their ‘quality’.

scholarly journals Does context really collapse in social media interaction?

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malgorzata Szabla ◽  
Jan Blommaert
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Normal Modes ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Interactional Sociolinguistics ◽  
Polish People ◽  
Media Interaction ◽  
Networked Publics

Abstract‘Context collapse’ (CC) refers to the phenomenon widely debated in social media research, where various audiences convene around single communicative acts in new networked publics, causing confusion and anxiety among social media users. The notion of CC is a key one in the reimagination of social life as a consequence of the mediation technologies we associate with the Web 2.0. CC is undertheorized, and in this paper we intend not to rebuke it but to explore its limits. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from “online communication” in general to specific forms of social action performed, not by predefined “group” members, but by actors engaging in emerging kinds of sharedness based on existing norms of interaction. This approach is a radical choice for action rather than actor, reaching back to symbolic interactionism and beyond to Mead, Strauss and other interactionist sociologists, and inspired by contemporary linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, notably the work of Rampton and the Goodwins. We apply this approach to an extraordinarily complex Facebook discussion among Polish people residing in The Netherlands – a set of data that could instantly be selected as a likely site for context collapse. We shall analyze fragments in detail, showing how, in spite of the complications intrinsic to such online, profoundly mediated and oddly ‘placed’ interaction events, participants appear capable of ‘normal’ modes of interaction and participant selection. In fact, the ‘networked publics’ rarely seem to occur in practice, and contexts do not collapse but expand continuously without causing major issues for contextualization. The analysis will offer a vocabulary and methodology for addressing the complexities of the largest new social space on earth: the space of online culture.

scholarly journals Live reality television: Care structures within the production and reception of talent shows

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Annette Hill ◽  
Tina Askanius ◽  
Koko Kondo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Social Experience ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Over Time

This article focuses on production and reception practices for live reality television using critical theory and empirical research to question how producers and audiences co-create and limit live experiences. The concept of care structures is used to make visible hidden labour in the creation of mood, in particular audiences as participants in the management of live experiences. In the case of Got to Dance, there was a play off between the value and meaning of the live events as a temporary experience captured by ratings and social media, and the more enduring collective-social experience of this reality series over time.

Political ‘apptivism’ in the Middle East: The case of iNakba

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 658-673
Author(s):  
Oren Golan ◽  
Noam Tirosh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Educational Tool ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Grassroots Level ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The use of social media in the Arab world has drawn an increasing amount of scholarly attention. Research addressing ‘Arab Spring’ upheavals and Islamic military movements has demonstrated grassroots level and often spontaneous uses of social media platforms. However, little attention has been paid to political apps as an emergent means of communication. Specifically, this study asks how users and developers view the use of political apps within the Israeli–Palestinian context by focusing on iNakba – an app that enables users to navigate Palestinian villages that were destroyed during the 1948 war and its aftermath. Ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative analysis of interviews with iNakba users and developers uncover three key facets of the app: (1) crowd mobilization, (2) educational tool that reanimates the invisible landscape of pre-1948 Palestine, and (3) promoting the Palestinian narrative. The study illuminates the role of political apps as agents of change for identity building and shaping users’ political consciousness.

scholarly journals Sincerely Fake: Exploring User-Generated Political Fakes and Networked Publics

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512096382
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network Sites ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Satire ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Networked Publics

This article investigates user-generated political satire, focusing in particular on one genre: fake political accounts. Such fakes, created as social media profiles, satirize politicians or political organizations by impersonating them. Through interviews with a sample of Italian fake accounts creators, I explore how the fakes navigate their fakeness vis-à-vis the affordances of social network sites and their publics. First, I map how the publics of the fake accounts react to the satire along two axes: one referring to the public’s understanding of the satire and the other to the uses that the public makes of the satire. Second, I show how fakeness is part of everyday interactions in networked publics. Third, I argue for fakeness as a playful, powerful, and sincere critique of the political and its pretense to authenticity. By focusing on fake political accounts, this article provides insights on the place of fakeness in online communication beyond the debate around “fake news.”

Do Celebrities Have It All? Context Collapse and the Networked Publics

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asha Kaul ◽  
Vidhi Chaudhri
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Approval ◽  
Loss Of Face ◽  
The Public ◽  
Identity Information ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Networked Publics

With the advent of social media and increase in networked publics, context collapse has emerged as a critical topic in the discussion of imagined audiences and blurring of the private and the public. The meshing of social contexts portends problematic issues as messages inadvertently reach unimagined audiences causing shame and leading to loss of ‘face’. In this article, we specifically study the impact of context collapse on some celebrities ‘who had it all’ yet, lost ‘it some’ to the world of networked public. The article examines celebrities sharing identity information across multiple contexts and explores situations of lost fame when ‘face’ is threatened, usage falters and breaks some of the well-established norms of interactivity. It concludes that lack of prudence in separating social contexts, loss of ‘face’ and social approval can dampen online celebrity presence. It proposes the use of ‘polysemy’ to simultaneously appeal to audiences from different contexts.

scholarly journals The Empty Space of Fragmented Intimacies on Khumbul'ekhaya

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nyasha Mboti
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
South African ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Empty Space

This article examines the nature of social media ‘talk’ generated by reality television (TV) audiences of Khumbul’ekhaya, a popular South African ‘docureality’ or ‘social reality’ series that has aired on SABC 1 since 2006. The article uses waThiong’o’s (1981) re-interpretation of the notion of ‘empty space’ to examine Khumbul’ekhaya viewers’ feedback on Facebook. I argue that this social media ‘talk’ reflects the fact that audiences typically treat Khumbul’ekhaya as an ‘empty space’ or a canvas which they variously reconstitute in their own languages.

scholarly journals Contrapuntal Connectedness: Analysing Relations Between Social Media Data and Ethnography in Digital Migration Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-85
Author(s):  
Marie Sandberg ◽  
Nina Grønlykke Mollerup ◽  
Luca Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
Migration Studies ◽  
Social Data ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Migration Research ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Media Data

AbstractThis chapter presents a rethinking of the relationship between ethnography and so-called big social data as being comparable to those between a sum and its parts (Strathern 1991/2004). Taking cue from Tim Ingold’s one world anthropology (2018) the chapter argues that relations between ethnography and social media data can be established as contrapuntal. That is, the types of material are understood as different, yet fundamentally interconnected. The chapter explores and qualifies this affinity with the aim of identifying potentials and further questions for digital migration research. The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with Syrian refugees and solidarians in the Danish–Swedish borderlands in 2018–2019 as well as data collected for 2011–2018 from 200 public Facebook pages run by solidarity organisations, NGOs, and informal refugee welcome and solidarity groups.

A social cognitive approach to traditional media content and social media use: Selfie-related behavior as competitive strategy

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A Stefanone ◽  
Zhiying Yue ◽  
Zena Toh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Network Size ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
The Relationship

Mass media systems play increasingly prevalent roles in our lives. However, the relationship between traditional mass media exposure and behavior on social media is unclear, particularly in the context of selfie-related behavior, which includes capturing, editing, and sharing images of oneself. In the tradition of social cognitive theory, we argue that reality television (RTV) models a value system focused on the self and competition with others, and hypothesize a model where self-worth based on competition mediates the relationship between RTV viewing and selfie-related behavior. Path analysis results from survey data ( N = 334) support the mediation model. Selfie-related behavior was explicated and measured via novel instruments. Audience variables including online network size and diversity also played roles in selfie editing and sharing, as did specific social media platforms. Results are discussed in the context of evolving media systems.

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