Rethinking digital media literacy to address body dissatisfaction in schools: Lessons from feminist new materialisms

The increasing prevalence of body dissatisfaction among young people is now well recognised with much of the existing literature making connections between media imagery and body dissatisfaction. Media literacy-based interventions continue to be rolled out in schools across the global north in an attempt to prevent body dissatisfaction. However, the pervasiveness of digital media in young people’s lives has prompted questions about the adequacy of current theories of media literacy and associated school-based interventions. We explore how feminist theories focused on the affective, material and more-than-human offer different insights into new digital configurations of agency and mediated learning. We reflect on this potential through analysing empirical data from a study involving arts-based workshops in two schools in the South West of England. Our focus on affect and agency as relational and entangled has important implications for theory and practice in school-based body image programmes and media literacy approaches.

Forever young: Gay men and cosmetic medical treatments

Purpose This study aims to explore innate and sociocultural forces that lead gay men to purchase invasive and non-invasive cosmetic medical treatments. Design/methodology/approach This work draws on a literature review and personal reflections to identify and interpret patterns and themes on drivers that encourage gay men to use cosmetic medical treatments. Findings In line with evolutionary theory, the authors suggest that the male proclivity to evaluate a partner’s sexual desirability on the basis of physical appearance and youth remains consistent among gay men. They also posit that sociocultural norms, such as media imagery, portray gay men as physically attractive and youthful. Among gay men, homonormative ideals that define attractiveness fall on a continuum ranging from hyper-masculinity to hypo-masculinity, with each end encouraging gay men to accept different beauty standards. Research limitations/implications To date, service researchers have mostly overlooked the role of evolution in consumers’ propensity to purchase professional services. This study sets the foundation for researchers to consider both instinctual and sociocultural norms that encourage consumers to purchase not only cosmetic medical treatments but also professional services in general. Practical implications Gay men represent a prime target market for cosmetic medical treatment providers, as their desire for physical attractiveness and youth remains constant as they age. Originality/value This study offers novel insights into gay male consumption of cosmetic medical treatments and services from theoretical and practical perspectives.

Memes and Social Messages: Teaching a Critical Literacies Curriculum on DAPL

This article documents the design and implementation of a culturally responsive critical media literacies curriculum centered around media representations of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Students (grades 6-8) were invited to discuss media imagery relating to DAPL and to create memes reflecting their understandings. To situate this work, we articulate a framework that blends critical media literacies and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy. We analyze students’ spoken and multimodal responses to a curriculum that purposefully foregrounded Native perspectives and digital media. Ultimately, we argue that students must be invited to leverage their epistemic privilege in responding to contemporary social issues.

Patient Representation and Diversity in Plastic Surgery Social Media

Background Plastic surgeons increasingly use social media as a means for patient engagement, trainee education and research dissemination. Appropriate patient diversity on these platforms is critical to promote interaction with all patients and ensure adequate training of plastic surgeons to work with diverse populations. Objectives This study aimed to assess patient representation, particularly of racial and ethnic groups, among plastic surgery Instagram accounts. Methods 9 Instagram accounts of plastic surgery journals and professional organizations were analyzed for posts containing patient images between April 2015 and June 2020. Each unique patient image was assessed for demographic factors. Skin tone was analyzed as a proxy for racial diversity, using the Fitzpatrick Scale to categorize as white (1-3) or non-white (4-6). Univariate analysis was performed to determine differences in representation. Results A total of 6719 posts from 5 journal and 4 professional organization accounts were found to contain 2547 unique patient images. 88.14% of patient images had white skin tone, while only 11.86% displayed non-white skin tone. Cosmetic procedure patient images had a higher frequency of white skin tone when compared with reconstruction images (89.93% vs. 81.98%, p<0.001). When compared to US Census data and the ASPS Annual Report data on race of patients undergoing plastic surgery, our data revealed significant underrepresentation of patients of color on social media (p<0.001). Conclusions This study highlights the underrepresentation of patients of color within social media imagery. Equitable representation of patients on social media is important to decrease patient barriers to healthcare and improve physician training to engage with diverse populations.

Confronting bias in the online representation of pregnancy

This article interrogates platform-specific bias in the contemporary algorithmic media landscape through a comparative study of the representation of pregnancy on the Web and social media. Online visual materials such as social media content related to pregnancy are not void of bias, nor are they very diverse. The case study is a cross-platform analysis of social media imagery for the topic of pregnancy, through which distinct visual platform vernaculars emerge. The authors describe two visualization methods that can support comparative analysis of such visual vernaculars: the image grid and the composite image. While platform-specific perspectives range from lists of pregnancy tips on Pinterest to pregnancy information and social support systems on Twitter, and pregnancy humour on Reddit, each of the platforms presents a predominantly White, able-bodied and heteronormative perspective on pregnancy.

‘Once more, with feeling,’ said the robot: AI, the end of work and the rise of emotional economies

This article calls for a new research agenda into ‘emotional economies’, or economies increasingly characterised by the creation, extraction and exploitation of emotional products and labour, enabled by and embedded in rapid advances in technological and digital-media systems. We base this concept and call on a literature review linking technological automation, the future of work and emotions. Our review finds that: (1) many existing studies – whether predicting dystopian end-of-work mass unemployment, or utopian complementarities between humans, machines and digital platforms – are technologically determinist in nature, and do not account for the roles of culture, society, government, business and education in the machine–human–emotion interface; (2) despite this, there is evidence that technology will replace many existing forms of human labour, leaving only technologically irreplaceable emotion-based soft-skill service work (and emotional labour) for humans to perform; (3) there is an outside chance (in some literature) that technology and AIs will replace even emotional labour, though we argue this is unlikely for many years; (4) the increasing centrality of emotional industries, emotional data and emotional labour to work, digital platforms and media-imagery will likely lead to emotions becoming vital commodities, central to the economies of the future. The article concludes with an urgent call for a new research agenda on emotional economies to elaborate on private/public intersections between work, economy and emotions that soberly engage with the future while challenging technologically determinist assumptions that underpin populist depictions of the end of work.

Understanding Social Media Beyond Text: A Reliable Practice on Twitter

Social media has been broadly applied in many applications in sales, marketing, event detection, etc. With high-volume and real-time data, social media has also been used for disaster responses. However, distinguishing between rumors and reliable information can be challenging, since social media, a user-generated content system, has a great number of users who update massive information every second. Furthermore, the rich information is not only included in the short text content but also embedded in the images, videos. In this paper, to address the emerging challenge of disaster response, we introduce a reliable framework for disaster information understanding and response with a practice on Twitter. The framework integrates both textual and imagery content from tweets in hope to fully utilize the information. The text classifier is built to remove noises, which can achieve 0.92 F1-score in classifying individual tweet. The image classifier is constructed by fine-tuning pre-trained VGG-F network, which can achieve 90\% accuracy. The image classifier serves as a verifier in the pipeline to reject or confirm the detected events. The evaluation indicates that the verifier can significantly reduce false positive events. We also explore Twitter-based drought management system and infrastructure monitoring system to further study the impacts of imagery content on event detection systems and we are able to pinpoint additional benefits which can be gained from social media imagery content.

Positionality and Commercialization of Political Content in US, UK Media Coverage of African Elections

Democracy, as the argument goes, has assumed a media character in the midst of mediatization of global politics. This has become more glaring in media coverage of politics vis-a-vis elections. In a way, it has fundamentally ignited the debate on media imagery and projection of power. Overall, the coverage to a large extent is particularistic in a sense as western media re-enacts the social realities of the global south to western audience. This chapter therefore argues that at the very core of this pattern of western media coverage of the global south, specifically, African elections, lies the positionality of issues and the commercialization of political contents. A recurring decimal of this coverage of African elections is the dominance of commercial contents over political journalism, mediatization, democratization, and political contents. The chapter also extrapolates the degree to which western media position African elections in a commercialized way and the implications of such media construction on political communication.