COLLABORATING AT MICROSCOPIC AND MASSIVE SCALES: THE CHALLENGE AND VALUE OF COVID ISOLATION FOR CRITICAL INTERNET STUDIES

Global events like a pandemic or climate change are massive in scope but experienced at the local, lived, microscopic level. What sorts of methodologies and mindsets can help critical internet researchers, functioning as interventionists or activists, find traction by oscillating between these levels? How can we push (further) against the boundaries of research methods to build stronger coalitions and more impactful outcomes for social change among groups of scholars/researchers? This panel presents four papers addressing these questions based on a large scale online autoethnography in 2020. This “Massive/Micro” project simultaneously used and studied the angst and novelty of isolation during a pandemic, activating researchers, activists, and artists to explore the massive yet microscopic properties of COVID-19 as a “glocal” phenomenon. The challenge? Working independently and microscopically through intense focus on the Self but also working with distributed, largely unknown collaborators, in multiple platforms. The emerging shape of the project itself showcases the challenges and possibilities of how research projects at scale can (or don’t) reflect and build social movements. The panel’s four papers situate the project through a kaleidoscope of perspectives featuring participants from 7 countries, who variously explore: the value of the project for precarious or early career researchers, how MMS worked as both collaborative space and critical pedagogy, how non-institutional or playful experimentation in asynchronous collaborations can lead to new synergies; and how MMS developed an independent life of its own, beyond studying COVID to generating multiple communities of future digital research practice.

MAPPING HEALTH: HOW DANES EXPERIENCE THEIR DIGITAL HEALTH DATA

This paper explores how Danish citizens experience digital health data and how these in turn affect their understanding of digital health data and their self-understanding as a patient. Previous research on digital health data examines primarily opportunities and challenges as well as structural effects concluding that having access to one's medical data is generally beneficial for patients but also comes with literacy challenges. The aim of this research is to look deeper into personal experiences with digital health data in order to understand what is at stake when people become digitally mapped patients and how experiences of empowerment, independence, perplexity, and doubt intermingle when reading one’s own health data. Taking a user’s view, the paper draws theoretically on the concept of ‘assemblage’ understanding digital health data as a complex nexus of user-data relationships. The empirical analysis draws on 16 in-depth purposefully sampled interviews that have been coded thematically. The primary analysis shows that digital health data creates unique, deeply emotional experiences that lead towards a variety of existential questions. Combining the theoretical lens with the empirical analysis this paper contributes with what we call ‘health assemblages’ that highlight the emerging relationships and personal emotional attachments users make with their digital health data. In conclusion, it can be stated that seeing oneself mapped in data creates unique experiences, often challenging the self-understanding of the patient.

MASK NARRATIVES PROMOTED BY ANTI-VACCINATION ACCOUNTS ON INSTAGRAM PRIOR TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked passionate debate worldwide on matters of public health. A portion of this debate has been dedicated to the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. While the majority of health officials agree that wearing a mask is efficacious, there has been a widespread movement against masks. The “anti-mask” movement is often characterized for spreading misinformation about masks and for its overlap with the anti-vaccine movement. This paper focuses on the mask sentiments of the anti-vaccination community prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to identify if the anti-vaccination movement held prior beliefs about masks to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases and if those beliefs differ from their mask sentiment today. Through thematic analysis of 44 Instagram posts prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that online vaccine safety communities have, in the past, regarded mask-wearing as a viable alternative to vaccines. Notably, posts supported the efficacy of mask-wearing while criticizing the mandates to wear masks in healthcare settings. In this paper, we elaborate on these mask narratives, as well as their implications in how the anti-vaccination group had a dramatic shift in mask sentiment during the pandemic.

“DO YOUR RESEARCH”: COVID-19, POST-SOCIALIST EXPERIENCE AND THE NARRATIVE OF INFORMATION INDEPENDENCE AMONG CZECH INSTAGRAM INFLUENCERS

The COVID-19 pandemics highlighted the role of social media influencers as political communicators and drew attention to the question of accountability of influencers and their overall role in the media ecosystem. The aim of the paper is to analyze the role of lifestyle Instagram influencers in shaping the public narrative about COVID-19 as an orchestrated political event aimed at curbing civic freedom in the Czech Republic with focus on two key elements: 1) the politicization of the domestic (space) on Instagram and its gendered nature and 2) the framing of the role of influencers as democratic public voices offering an alternative to mainstream media, within the context of the post-socialist historical experience of totalitarian past. The presented analysis builds on digital ethnography among Czech female lifestyle influencers and content analysis of selected Czech influencers profiles.

TECHNOLOGICAL AGNOSTICISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE: PLATFORM CULTURE ON TECHNOLOGY FORUM WHIRLPOOL

This paper explores the (limited) discussion of climate change within energy debates on Australian technology forum Whirlpool. These discussions are characterised by $2 , which is an attitude that no technology is $2 or $2 than any other because different technologies have different applications depending on the requirement. By completing a thematic analysis of all Whirlpool replies within four threads centred on energy debates (n = 3,101), I observed Whirlpool contributors depoliticise energy technologies by removing climate change as a factor when considering technology choices. Overall, I found that when technological agnosticism was expressed within these debates, it intersected with issues concerning the $2 , $2 , $2 , and $2 of technology and pushed against concerns regarding climate change. I argue that the prevalence of technological agnosticism within these debates is not an example of climate change denial per se but a reflection of Whirlpool’s platform culture which valorises traits of $2 such as rationality and neutrality (Massanari, 2017). I conclude by comparing Whirlpool’s platform culture to Reddit and suggest that future research ought to explore how particular platform cultures shape energy debates and ultimately, attitudes and action towards climate change.

CARING FOR OUR PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS RESPONSES TO COVID-19 ERA INFORMATIC COLONIALISM

Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, activist work and HCI approaches, these papers show how organizations formed partnerships to curate information resources, and deploy community Wi-Fi and Internet infrastructure across southwest US Indigenous communities during the most challenging months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. For Native Americans this means ideating while navigating colonial inequality. Through an investigation of sociotechnical interdependencies across a broadband network cooperative, tribes, and university labs, an HCI team reflects on how relational stability sustains fragile Internet ecologies stretched to capacity by the needs of users deeply affected by COVID-19 in New Mexico and Arizona. Through an autoethnography of community-centered digital solutions for Navajo Nation, a member of the Nation considers how the role of K’é informs a system of infrastructural care in a nation struggling with high rates of infection and systemic lack of adequate infrastructure. Through an advocacy-oriented analysis of social media content, a Diné and Lakota social media scholar discerns the relationship between community enforcement of social distancing, the loss of interpersonal interaction, mutual aid, and the impact of public health memes for the Navajo Nation. Through radical librarianship practices, a Tohono O’odham librarian and artist counteracts the values of ‘information neutrality’ shaping whiteness-centering American librarianship by generating a community-curated solution to actionable information about COVID-19 for Indigenous communities. This panel models decolonial liberation rooted in responsiveness across mediated layers of Indigenous belonging. The authors express Indigenous interpretations of collective autonomy vis-a-vis strategic Internet assemblages, and particularly, how an Indigenous ethics of care intersects with the dream of an Internet for social good.

FAKE POPULARITY FOR REAL MONEY: COMMERCIAL ASTROTURFING AND DATA BUBBLE ON CHINESE DIGITAL PLATFORM

This on-going research delineates the constructing of an interlocking ecosystem around popularity magnification on popular Chinese digital platforms, which we refer as “data bubble”. Similar to the bubble in a stock market or in real estate market in different economies where the price of assets substantially exceeds its intrinsic value, we propose “data bubble” as a neologism to describe the phenomenon and ecosystem of manipulating data to aim for an inflated popularity on Chinese digital platforms, which ultimately pitch to higher commercial and financial values. We argue that data bubble is laced with platform company’s commercial and financial imperatives, logics of datafication and popularity of platform as data infrastructure, and active participation from different user groups and complementors, and a deeply embedded mentality of “traffic is king”. It is achieved through mixed data practices including data optimization, commercial astroturfing, and counterfeit data manufacturing behind which a wide range of actors and entities are involved. They range from platforms, individual end users (fans in particular), influencers, multi-channel networks (MCNs) and incubators, celebrities and their agencies, click farms, and advertisers—all of them have achieved their own ends and thus actively participated in fabricating data bubble in one way or another. The practices of data manipulating and optimization by different participants in constructing data bubble, as a result, have driven the data metrics on Chinese platforms far over—and no longer representative of—the actual popularity.

THE CASE ACT: IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNET STUDIES RESEARCH

Copyright policy is inextricably entangled with the work of academic researchers on Internet culture. This paper examines a new U.S. law, the CASE Act, which creates a new venue for resolving copyright disputes for up to $30,000. We discuss the implications of such a venue for U.S.-based internet studies research.

FROM DIGITAL INFLUENCERS TO INFLUENCER-LABORATORIES. A CASE STUDY OF LIL MIQUELA

This research focuses on an emerging influencer category called CGI influencers. CGI influencers are fictional characters created with computer modeling techniques that have profiles on social networks and sociomaterial trajectories built with the aid of digital marketing, business intelligence and media companies. As an empirical object, we chose Lil Miquela - "the robot influencer", one of the most successful examples of this genre of micro celebrity on Instagram. Our main goal was to map the ways in which Miquela acts on Instagram and to find traces that allow us to explore better the interrelationship between the strategies adopted by Miquela's creators team and her appropriations of Instagram affordances that shapes the ways in which she acts both as a fictional character and as a digital influencer. We extracted 1089 posts available in Miquela’s feed up to June 2021and used content analysis and mixed digital methods techniques to explore the data. We observed three ways of acting (practices) that are characteristic of Miquela and operate interdependently: (a) The Fictional Character, (b) The Experiment and (c) The Influencer. These findings could suggest that the three versions of Miquela act as an experimental model of what we here call “influencer-laboratories”: a type of digital influencer for which the influencer itself acts as a controlled experiment used to investigate which sociomaterial arrangements create conditions that favor the production of online influence on digital platforms.

MEMEING AGAINST MAINSTREAM. AN ANALYSIS OF DANK MEMES AND THE PICTORIAL (COUNTER-)PRACTICES OF MEME CULTURE

Internet memes are now part of mainstream media culture. On social media, each day memes are created, consumed, and shared by millions of people. Advertising agencies create their own memes to promote brands and products. However, memes are also integral to subcultures on 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr, where most memes originate from. These subcultures battle the mainstreamization of memes to protect the independent media making practice of memeing from outsiders, who they call ‘normies.’ Their weapon of choice are so-called ‘dank memes,’ which are self-reflexive internet memes that criticize mainstream memes and memeing. This critique is a form of visual vernacular criticism, which is highly understudied, especially in regard to digital metapictures such as dank memes. The question this paper wants to answer is: how are dank memes made and employed to reclaim the independent media making practice of memeing from mainstream and marketing culture? The focus lies on specific pictorial practices that counteract the popularization and commercialization of internet memes. To explore these counter-practices, the paper proposes a methodology that combines media philosophy with practice theory to stress that digital metapictures themselves such as dank memes hold knowledge about the media practices that mainstream memes are made of, and about how to counteract them. To explore this media knowledge, examples of the meta-meme $2 are closely examined in the context of the subreddit r/dankmemes. The conducted picture practice analysis suggests that dank memes oppose image macros, while being criticized themselves as mere shibboleths to meme culture.