scholarly journals Synthetic bodies and feeling generators

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-140
Author(s):  
Michela De Carlo

The main purpose of this paper is to describe emerging forms of art and social practices that arise in the social media era, after the coming together of the self-awareness reflected in online environments and the conscious passivity of individuals to the algorithmic manipulation of desires. Accordingly, what follows is a brief introduction to these new forms of social structures and a description of the elements that shape the perfect projection of ourselves in our online experience, combined with samples of artworks investigating the forms and languages emerging in our social media life.

Rhetorik ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Kuhlhüser

AbstractNowadays, we live in mediatized environments, which are more and more shaped by visual means of expression. Visual social media platforms, such as Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest and Snapchat, are now the tools of communication and self-representation - especially for the younger generations. How users of these visual social media use hashtags and pictures in a rhetorical way to realize their personal representation is shown in this article by analyzing ›travel-narrations‹ of public accounts on Instagram. After a short theoretical approach, which includes the application of the strategic rhetorical process on the social practices on Instagram, the hashtag and the picture are characterized as rhetorical instruments. The analysis showed that there are specific practices of idealized self-representation as a certain type of traveler and rhetorical-communicative patterns, concerning the way hashtags are applied and pictures are uploaded by the users. The result is that even on a mainly visual platform, like Instagram, pictures as a form of communication are too undefined without the textual component in form of hashtags, which are essential contextgiving resources. Thus, the successful realization of the self-representation includes both communication forms, which dialectically build meaning together.


2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Alice Baker ◽  
Chris Rojek

The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the 21st century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson’s lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson’s persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intimacy, authenticity and integrity. We demonstrate how social media have increased the levels of emotional investment, trust and attention capital in para-social relationships by providing ubiquitous access to native experts and creating the platform to achieve influence and micro-celebrity status. Finally, we contend that the growing number of lifestyle gurus providing the public with health advice and scientific knowledge points to the need to examine critically the social and cultural landscape that enables micro-celebrities to emerge.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511986180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ursula Lutzky ◽  
Robert Lawson

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, “proper” gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica Aresta ◽  
Luís Pedro ◽  
Carlos Santos ◽  
António Moreira

Social media is changing the way individuals collaborate, learn and express themselves, allowing for the construction of an identity and a reputation that encompasses over many other digital spaces. In a context where the online identity of individuals may reveal the sum of their experiences and skills, reflecting the path of their personal, academic and professional lives, this paper introduces a conceptual framework and a model developed to analyse the construction of the self in online environments. The model was used in a research study developed at University of Aveiro, Portugal, aiming to analyse how identity is built and managed in formal and informal digital environments and reveals the existence of two main online identity profiles – context driven and user-driven identity profiles.


2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-57
Author(s):  
Catherine Engh

Abstract This essay places Wollstonecraft’s late novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) in conversation with Rousseau’s thought on natural education in Emile (1762). In both texts, aesthetic sensibility is a foundation of religious belief and a crucial feature of a program of natural education that aims at freedom. Education falters, however, as Rousseau’s student and Wollstonecraft’s heroine are consigned to exile by a prejudiced society. Though Rousseau and Wollstonecraft make strong claims for the moral and liberating possibilities of aesthetic sensibility, they differ in their interpretation of exile. Wollstonecraft rewrites Rousseau’s portrait of the self-sufficient exile to highlight her outcast heroine’s estrangement from the vital forces that animate life and the mind. Natural education fails in Wrongs of Woman because the cultivation of sensibility remains separate from the work of reforming the social structures that discredit women’s reason.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Prakash Gondode ◽  
◽  
Amrusha Raipure ◽  
Bhuvaneswari Balasubramanian ◽  
Abhinav Lambe ◽  
...  

Background: We assessed knowledge, attitudes, practice, and perceptions about COVID-19 among a convenience sample of the general public in India anticipating the second wave of the pandemic. Methods: This questionnaire-based survey was conducted among the general population quarantined at various institutional quarantine facilities in the city of Nagpur, Maharashtra, India. Informed consent was obtained from each participant. The self-designed questionnaire comprised 25 questions regarding knowledge, eight for attitude, and ten for practice. Knowledge questions were responded to on a Yes/No basis with an additional ‘don’t know’ option. The true answer was given 1 point and false/I don’t know answers were given 0 point. Results: The majority of the participants were aware of COVID-19 (97.9%) and did not either wash or knew how to properly dispose of the used mask (88.02%). Only 10.96% of the participants agreed that they verify the social media posts shared over WhatsApp and Facebook on government authentic websites before sharing them with family and friends. Conclusion: Awareness about the virus, modes of spread, good practice, and an optimistic attitude is the prime requisite to curb the spread and to avoid the impending severity anticipating the second wave of the pandemic.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelius RL Teluma ◽  
Rini Kartini

Social media is a socio-technological entity. Social media text is a representation of the social, cultural, economic and political dimensions of its users. When social media was known and used by the young generation of the Lamaholot people, there was a cultural interaction with the Lamaholot Lika Telo kinship culture which gave birth to identity and Lamaholot-cyber self. This research is textual-contextual research using virtual ethnographic methods that aim to identify and describe the general characteristics of Lamaholot-cyber social media characteristics. The subjects examined are Lamaholot Facebook users who are members of a Facebook group "Suara Flotim". The virtual ethnographic observations of the self-presentation of Lamaholot Facebookers showed that the cyber Lamaholot was a self and a discursive identity even to be paradoxical entity.


Author(s):  
Natalie Ann Hendry ◽  
Katrin Tiidenberg ◽  
Crystal Abidin ◽  
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye ◽  
Jing Zeng ◽  
...  

Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books. Together, the papers offer an analysis of TikTok, WeChat, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. Because of the book-length analyses preceding the panel, we are able to distill what is distinct and recognizable about these platforms – what we call ‘platform specificities’ and demonstrate how these specificities are shaping not only the experiences of the users of those platforms, but the social media ecosystem more broadly. The panel contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding platform power, social media and ways of making sense of social media, painting in board strokes plausible future developments to keep an eye on. The extended abstract holds a panel rationale and five extended abstracts for each analyzed platform.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-106
Author(s):  
Roberto Simanowski

This article develops the hypothesis that the intensified self-portraying and self-exhibition so characteristic of many of today’s social-media practices do not correlate with intensified self-reflection but, on the contrary, indicate a tendency towards self-loss. However, it would be wrong-headed to blame the social networks for distracting from real life. Rather, it is the loss of reality in the real life of contemporary life-worlds that renders social networks an enticing narcissistic way out of an existential horror vacui manifesting itself in new ways within digital culture. In diagnostic terms we can speak of a cultural change towards a posthuman narration of the self. Three vectors of this posthuman narration of the self are distinguished: From word to number, from mechanism to automatism, and from option to obligation


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-226
Author(s):  
Rafał Lawendowski ◽  
Tomasz Besta

A correlational study was conducted among attendees of three music festivals in Poland ( N = 828). The main goal was to examine how functions ascribed to music are related to (a) a feeling of being united with other attendees, (b) the perception of being independent from or (c) interdependent with other attendees, and (d) a feeling of self-growth resulting in self-expansion. Using structural equation modelling, we showed the following. First, people who feel stronger connections and experience more personal relationships with other attendees report a stronger feeling of self-growth during music festivals and ascribe more importance to the social functions of music. Second, a strong, direct relationship exists between independent self-construal (i.e., an individualistic view of the self as autonomous from other people) and the self-awareness function of music as well as between interdependent self-construal (i.e., a more collectivistic view of the self as embedded in the group and community) and the social function of music. Finally, the results of the mediation analysis of self-expansion for the relationships between different aspects of self and the functions of music indicated that self-expansion is a statistically significant partial mediator of these relationships for the social and self-awareness function of music but not for the emotional function. That is, participants, who experienced changes in self-construct related to self-growth and self-development from their participation in a music festival used music to facilitate self-awareness and social relatedness.


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