First Helicon Plasma Physics and Applications Workshop

The First Helicon Plasma Physics and Applications Workshop was held on September 23−24, 2021, through Zoom Cloud Meeting, instead of in an on-site gathering, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was convened by Rod Boswell (IOC) and Guangnan Luo (LOC), and organised by Lei Chang’s group. The workshop attracted 110 registrations and ∼100 online audiences from ∼30 affiliations. There were 33 presentations covering the various fundamental physics of helicon plasma and its applications to space electric propulsion, material processing, and magnetic confinement fusion. This paper highlights the presentations, discussions, and perspectives given in the workshop, serving as reference for the helicon community.

Cyberchondria, Coronavirus, and Cybercrime

Humans are adapting to and increasingly relying on technology particularly in times of global crisis. As online audiences increase, so does the risk of cybercrime. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is discussed in the context of health anxiety, the infodemic and cyberchondria, along with cybercriminal exploitation of pandemic-induced human anxiety and psychological vulnerability. Health anxiety, uncertainty, social isolation, changes to work-life practices, information seeking, mistrust of public health organisations, and the spread of false information all arguably intersect – leading to a global state of human vulnerability and therefore presenting opportunities for cybercriminals. There is a requirement for global agencies such as the United Nations, the WHO, INTERPOL, and governments to take action. Police agencies worldwide need to extrapolate learnings regarding the current pandemic and attendant increase in cybercrime and based on those findings move to form a global coalition with industry partners to investigate, predict, and prevent a potential future cybercrime pandemic.

Tweet Carefully, Museums: A Case Study of the #decolonizeourmuseums Protest

<p>Tweet Carefully, Museums presents an in-depth case study of audiences and a museum using social media in the current Web 2.0 age. It explores online protest and controversy over an event held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) in 2015. This dissertation addresses a current gap in the literature centred on public use of social media as a platform to engage in museum-centred debate and discussion. At the moment, literature discussing new technologies in museums focuses heavily on an institution-to-audiences model. While this is indeed useful information, there is another aspect of digital media that has been largely neglected. In their case study, Gronemann et al. observed that overall, museums distanced themselves from discursive co-construction in their Facebook posts. The lack of engagement with audience can have adverse effects as social media grows in its popularity to mobilise the public in the name of social justice. “Western” museums, many of which have a history of fostering colonial narratives, can also be perceived as authoritative institutions. Museums need to engage more conscientiously with their online audiences. Unconsidered or insensitive engagement over social media may have adverse effects on institutions. Kimono Wednesdays was an event where the public was invited to try on kimono in Gallery 255 at the MFA. The MFA advertised the event on a few social media platforms. On Facebook, the advertisement drew the harshest criticisms from a section of the Asian-American community. The sensational attention on Facebook grew quickly into physical protest inside Gallery 255. This case study analyses a sample of the dialogic posts, comments, and replies left on Facebook during the protests. It also analyses a symposium organised by the MFA, Kimono Wednesdays: A Conversation, where a panel made up of academics, museum staff, and a protester discussed the various concepts and perceptions of the museum’s controversial advertising and event. This case study demonstrates that social media is a double-edged sword for museums, as it is a useful tool, but presents uncomfortable challenges. The key findings from this study show how content on the internet can be misinterpreted and how implicit bias can occur from any institution. As museums embrace Web 2.0 applications, they too must become more aware of their online presence and set in place methods of dialogic co-construction so as to better understand and communicate with the diversifying cultures that surround them.</p>

Tweet Carefully, Museums: A Case Study of the #decolonizeourmuseums Protest

<p>Tweet Carefully, Museums presents an in-depth case study of audiences and a museum using social media in the current Web 2.0 age. It explores online protest and controversy over an event held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) in 2015. This dissertation addresses a current gap in the literature centred on public use of social media as a platform to engage in museum-centred debate and discussion. At the moment, literature discussing new technologies in museums focuses heavily on an institution-to-audiences model. While this is indeed useful information, there is another aspect of digital media that has been largely neglected. In their case study, Gronemann et al. observed that overall, museums distanced themselves from discursive co-construction in their Facebook posts. The lack of engagement with audience can have adverse effects as social media grows in its popularity to mobilise the public in the name of social justice. “Western” museums, many of which have a history of fostering colonial narratives, can also be perceived as authoritative institutions. Museums need to engage more conscientiously with their online audiences. Unconsidered or insensitive engagement over social media may have adverse effects on institutions. Kimono Wednesdays was an event where the public was invited to try on kimono in Gallery 255 at the MFA. The MFA advertised the event on a few social media platforms. On Facebook, the advertisement drew the harshest criticisms from a section of the Asian-American community. The sensational attention on Facebook grew quickly into physical protest inside Gallery 255. This case study analyses a sample of the dialogic posts, comments, and replies left on Facebook during the protests. It also analyses a symposium organised by the MFA, Kimono Wednesdays: A Conversation, where a panel made up of academics, museum staff, and a protester discussed the various concepts and perceptions of the museum’s controversial advertising and event. This case study demonstrates that social media is a double-edged sword for museums, as it is a useful tool, but presents uncomfortable challenges. The key findings from this study show how content on the internet can be misinterpreted and how implicit bias can occur from any institution. As museums embrace Web 2.0 applications, they too must become more aware of their online presence and set in place methods of dialogic co-construction so as to better understand and communicate with the diversifying cultures that surround them.</p>

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

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.

China’s viral villages: Digital nationalism and the COVID-19 crisis on online video-sharing platform Bilibili

When the COVID-19 virus broke out in China, foreign observers speculated whether the Chinese leadership was facing its ‘Chernobyl Moment’. China’s leadership, however, defied foreign expectations about its ostensibly floundering legitimacy and instead turned the crisis into a national success story. This article explores the role that digital media played in cementing this success, specifically how various actors mobilized nationalist sentiments and discourses on the online video-sharing platform Bilibili. By focusing on visual discourses, online commentaries, and the affordances of the digital platform, the article analyses the role that ‘hip’ and youthful content played in the authorities’ attempts to guiding online audiences to rally around the flag. The results of these efforts were viral villages of community sentiment that created strong incentives for conformity, and in which the official party line was able to reverberate with pop-culture memes and popular nationalism.

IN(TER)DEPENDENCE IN PLATFORMED CREATION

In recent years, a variety of cultural industries have been transformed by platformization – a process in which technology companies serve as intermediaries connecting different parties (most importantly cultural producers and audiences) through websites and applications. From music to book publishing, movie production, and the visual arts, cultural production has undergone massive changes due to platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Goodreads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Etsy, etc. In most cultural sectors, creators now have to grapple with the platforms that make their work visible to online audiences. This often means paying close attention to the quantitative infrastructure of platforms, namely their algorithms and analytics, which drive visibility and commercial success. This panel examines what these economic and technological changes imply for the independence of cultural production. Classical studies of culture often emphasized the role that the values of independence and autonomy play in shaping artists’ worldviews and practices. From Bourdieu’s analysis of “fields of cultural production” as “the economic world reversed” to Becker’s theory of “art worlds” where internal dynamics redefine external constraints, or the Frankfurt School’s critical take on the demise of aura through mechanical reproduction, sociological approaches have paid close attention to the threats to independence emerging under modern capitalism. In fact, most classical sociology saw cultural producers in the mass cultural industries as having little independence, often assuming (sometimes without empirical research) that the massification of culture would destroy original and critical art works. Here we revisit the question of independence in the context of platformed creation – a term that embraces all forms of cultural production that are mediated, in part or completely, through digital platforms. By bringing together scholars studying different aspects of platformed creation and reflecting on the concept of independence through diverse disciplinary lenses, we ask: what does independence look like in the context of platformed creation? What are some of the theoretical and methodological tools available to scholars for making sense of cultural, economic, and technological independence in the case of platformed creation? And how do these evolving forms of independence affect the kinds of art works and cultural tropes that circulate online? These different studies aim to put the concept of independence in dialogue with the question of interdependence (among cultural producers, audiences, and platforms) in a mediated digital world.

Effects of Passive Leadership in the Digital Age

Organizations must adapt to the trend of digitalization. Nowadays, social media engagement editors play an increasingly crucial role for organizational growth and prosperity in the digital age. Engagement editors are usually tasked to perform the functions of marketing, content production, and data analysis. They have to manage online communities on behalf of the organization, and encounter online audiences' frequent toxic and aggressive behaviors. Engagement editors thus are prone to emotional stress. Substantial literature has examined the influence of leadership style on employee performance. However, passive leadership is rarely studied. This research investigates (1) whether passive leadership would negatively affect engagement editors' performance (i.e., online interaction with audiences); and (2) how the negativity would be ameliorated by certain organizational policies (i.e., job autonomy) and their individual attributes (i.e., employee resilience) from the conservation of resource perspective. We surveyed 122 engagement editors and used the smartPLS 3.2.9 to analyze the data. This research provides important theoretical and practical implications.

The Online Market’s Invisible Hand: Internet Media and Rising Populism

Given the recent surge of global populism, this article explores the relationship between Internet/social media and support for populist parties by focusing on the structure of the online marketplace. We argue that structure shapes digital networks’ incentives in terms of the content they favor, and marketing strategies they employ to distribute content on a mass scale. Specifically, concentrated/oligopolistic markets mean powerful digital entities that can leverage the regulatory process—thereby weakening constraints and incentivizing consumption/profit above all else. Consequently, these entities can freely favor more incendiary/attention-generating content, and use their outsized influence to saturate the online marketplace with targeted advertising—all of which can amplify the diffusion of populist rhetoric and intensify support bases. Using original data on Internet ownership concentration, social media user-traffic, and populist party vote share in 34 democracies, our findings suggest that concentration of Internet ownership and online audiences each contribute to rising support for populism.

Screendance Festivals and Online Audiences

No abstract available.