scholarly journals “Retweet for More”: The Serialization of Porn on the Twitter Alter Community

Author(s):  
Ruepert Jiel Dionisio Cao

This article examines the notion of seriality in the context of the Filipino alter community, a network of Twitter users producing, distributing, and consuming pornographic images. The alter community is prominent among Filipino gay men who satisfy their need for sexual arousal, collective identity, and validation of their sexuality in the alter community. Seriality is influenced by technological features and affordances of a media platform. In the case of Twitter, the platform’s short form formats and real-time content generation fosters a particular kind of seriality. This essay analyzes data from online observations, content analysis of tweets and profiles, and interviews and is informed by theories on seriality, gay sexuality, and Internet studies. In situating seriality within the context of gay amateur porn economy, this article argues that serial pornography is instrumental in satisfying both present and long-standing affective, sexual, and social needs of gay men. These needs, this essay claims, stem from long history of minoritization of homosexuality. As Twitter renders older tweets ephemeral and quantifies social engagement, seriality enables gay men to satisfy the aforementioned needs longer. Furthermore, this essay proposes that serial porn on Twitter brings new insights to how seriality is conceived. Serial porn images are strategically and carefully constructed narratives of sexual encounters aimed at garnering higher social engagement and validation. Thus, serial narratives can resolve present and urgent affective tensions and needs that unravel within an ongoing life narrative rather than working toward supporting a plausible ending, as seen in other serial forms. This article contributes to an understanding of how pornographic images and serial narratives fit into consumerist culture and how platforms exploit long-standing affective needs of sexual minorities to ensure extended production and consumption of contents.

Author(s):  
Floor Haalboom

This article argues for more extensive attention by environmental historians to the role of agriculture and animals in twentieth-century industrialisation and globalisation. To contribute to this aim, this article focuses on the animal feed that enabled the rise of ‘factory farming’ and its ‘shadow places’, by analysing the history of fishmeal. The article links the story of feeding fish to pigs and chickens in one country in the global north (the Netherlands), to that of fishmeal producing countries in the global south (Peru, Chile and Angola in particular) from 1954 to 1975. Analysis of new source material about fishmeal consumption from this period shows that it saw a shift to fishmeal production in the global south rather than the global north, and a boom and bust in the global supply of fishmeal in general and its use in Dutch pigs and poultry farms in particular. Moreover, in different ways, the ocean, and production and consumption places of fishmeal functioned as shadow places of this commodity. The public health, ecological and social impacts of fishmeal – which were a consequence of its cheapness as a feed ingredient – were largely invisible on the other side of the world, until changes in the marine ecosystem of the Pacific Humboldt Current and the large fishmeal crisis of 1972–1973 suddenly changed this.


Author(s):  
Giandomenico Di Domenico ◽  
Annamaria Tuan ◽  
Marco Visentin

AbstractIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retweets. In particular, the presence of misinformation plays an interesting role in spreading the tweet on the network. More importantly, the relative influence of the cues suggests that Twitter users actually read a tweet but not necessarily they understand or critically evaluate it before deciding to share it on the social media platform.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines Prodöhl

AbstractThis article traces the complex and shifting organization of soy's production and consumption from Northeast China to Europe and the United States. It focuses on a set of national and transnational actors with differing interests in the global and national spread of soybeans. The combination of these actors in certain spatiotemporal contexts enabled a fundamental change in soy from an Asian to an American cash crop. At the beginning of the twentieth century, soy rapidly became Northeast China's cash crop, owing to steadily increasing Western demand. However, the versatility of soy – and soy oil in particular – offered a highly successful response to the agricultural and industrial challenges that the United States faced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the end of the war, American farmers in the Midwest cultivated more soybeans than their Chinese counterparts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 184-196
Author(s):  
Maja Dorota Wojciechowska

PurposeSocial capital, understood as intangible community values available through a network of connections, is a factor in the development of societies and improving quality of life. It helps to remove economic inequalities and prevent poverty and social exclusion, stimulate social and regional development, civic attitudes and social engagement and build a civic society as well as local and regional identity. Many of these tasks may be implemented by libraries, which, apart from providing access to information, may also offer a number of services associated with social needs. The purpose of this paper is to present the roles and functions that libraries may serve in local communities in terms of assistance, integration and development based on classical social capital theories.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the classical concepts of social capital in the context of libraries. It analyses the findings of Pierre-Félix Bourdieu, James Coleman, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Putnam, Nan Lin, Ronald Stuart Burt, Wayne Baker and Alejandro Portes. Based on their respective concepts, the paper analyses the role of the contemporary library in the social life of local communities. In particular, it focuses on the possible new functions that public libraries may serve.FindingsA critical review of the concept of social capital revealed certain dependencies between libraries and their neighbourhoods. With new services that respond to the actual social needs, libraries may serve as a keystone, namely they may integrate, animate and engage local communities. This, however, requires a certain approach to be adopted by the personnel and governing authorities as well as infrastructure and tangible resources.Originality/valueThe social engagement of libraries is usually described from the practical perspective (reports on the services provided) or in the context of research on the impact of respective projects on specific groups of users (research reports). A broader approach, based on original social theories, is rarely encountered. The paper draws on classical concepts of social capital and is a contribution to the discussion on possible uses of those concepts based on an analysis of the role of libraries in social life and in strengthening the social capital of local communities.


1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Chivallon

Unlike research in the Anglophone West Indies, research in the French West Indies has only very recently developed the idea of the existence of a peasant social group in the plantation societies of Guadeloupe and Martinique. The fragility and instability of the collective identity in the French West Indies has served as a principal argument to support the view that the group is not a peasantry but a mere by-product of the plantation system. The idea of the absence of a real process of taking control of space or of a sort of intimate history with space occurs in some writings to explain this weakness of collective sense. Far from refuting the argument which firmly links the identity question to that of space, I shall reinforce it but in order to show that, on the contrary, there arc good grounds for affirming the existence, in the case of the peasant group in Martinique, of an original social experience in which space is strongly mobilised. In doing this, my intention is also to add weight to a theoretical point of view which shows the strength of the ties between space and identity, given that the peasant world in Martinique provides a paradigmatic example of the undeniable power of these ties.


Author(s):  
Francesca Orestano

By dwelling first on the ‘faults’, then on the ‘excellencies’ remarked by reviewers and critics of Little Dorrit, this chapter also traces the history of that novel’s critical reception as it evolved from a close focus on contemporary politics and economics toward a study of the writer’s Hogarthian skill at building a visual satire. Subsequently the characters’ psychology as well as Dickens’s became the object of critical enquiry. When visual studies brought to the fore the import of perception and its narrative function, another area of investigation opened, in this chapter specifically connected with, and culturally encoded in, the technique of the stereoscope and the scientific notion of the binocularity of vision. Implemented by Dickens in the construction of Little Dorrit, this notion allows for a further critical reading of the novel as lieu de mémoire where real and imagined imprisonments, inscribed in history, also conjure the scene where cultural memory rewrites individual and collective identity in the present.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-146
Author(s):  
Aysun Bozanta ◽  
Birgul Kutlu

Purpose The purpose of this study is to figure out the visiting behaviors of the users who have different characteristics on Twitter. Design/methodology/approach The visit history of users who share their Foursquare check-ins on Twitter and the characteristics of visited venues (category, check-in count, tip count, like count, rating, and price tier) was collected with Foursquare API. In addition, the number of followers, friends, tweets and favorite-count were collected via Twitter API. First, users were clustered according to their Twitter related attributes. After that, profiling was applied on clusters according to the characteristics of the venues that were visited by the users. Findings Clustering analysis generated three clusters, namely, ordinary, talkative and popular. For each cluster, the visited venues were investigated according to the price classification, check-in, like, tip counts and the categories. The users in ordinary class prefer cheaper venues rather than talkative and popular users. On the other hand, popular users prefer the venues with the highest average number of check-ins, likes and tip counts. The top two categories for all clusters are cafe and shopping mall. Originality/value This study differentiates from the other studies in the literature by examining the data from Twitter with clustering and profiling these clusters with Foursquare data to understand venue preferences of Twitter users having various characteristics. The findings of this study will provide new insights for business owners to understand the customers more comprehensively and design better marketing strategies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7-2020) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Olga E. Konovalova ◽  
◽  
Nikolai M. Kuznetsov ◽  

The article tells the story of the creation of the Nizhne-Tulomskaya hydroelectric power station (HPP). The main energy parameters of the hydroelectric power station, the layoutof the main structures of the station, and archival photos of the construction time are given. Data on the production and consumption of electricity for own needs, the cost of 1 kW·h during the great Patriotic war are shown. It is told about the reconstruction and current state of the station.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 344
Author(s):  
Hatib Abdul Kadir

The research subject of this paper focuses on the Butonese, who are considered “outside” the local culture, despite having lived in the Moluccas islands of Indonesia for more than a hundred years. The Butonese compose the largest group of migrants to the Moluccas. This article research does not put ethnicity into a fixed, classified group of a population; rather, the research explores ethnicity as a living category in which individuals within ethnic groups also have opportunities for social mobility and who struggle for citizenship. The Butonese has a long history of being considered “subaltern citizens” or have frequently been an excluded community in post-colonial societies. They lack rights to land ownership and bureaucratic access. This article argues that Indonesian democracy has bred opposition between indigenous and migrant groups because, after the Reformation Era, migrants, as a minority, began to participate in popular politics to express themselves and make up their rights as “citizens”. Under the condition of democratic political participation, the Butonese found a way to mobilize their collective identity in order to claim the benefits of various governmental programs. Thus, this paper is about the contentiousness of how the rural Butonese migrants gained advantageous social and political status in the aftermath of the sectarian conflict between 1999 to 2003. Migrant’s ability to express their grievance in a constructive way through the politics of their representatives and state government policies have led to the new contentious issues between indigenous and migrant populations.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Shane J. Barter

Abstract Studies of coffee production and consumption are dominated by emphases on Latin American production and American consumption. This paper challenges the Atlantic perspective, demanding an equal emphasis on the Indian Ocean world of Eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A geographical approach to historical as well as contemporary patterns of coffee production and consumption provides an opportunity to rethink the nature of coffee as a global commodity. The Indian Ocean world has a much deeper history of coffee, and in recent decades, has witnessed a resurgence in production. The nature of this production is distinct, providing an opportunity to rethink dependency theories. Coffee in the Indian Ocean world is more likely to be produced by smallholders, countries are less likely to be economically dependent on coffee, farmers are more likely to harvest polycultures, and countries represent both consumers and producers. A balanced emphasis of Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds allows us to better understand coffee production and consumption, together telling a more balanced, global story of this important commodity.


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