We All Scream for Ice Cream

In the United States, women with breast cancer often find their identity confined by a sociocultural context that encourages them to adopt an overly optimistic outlook while hiding signs of their physical illness. Online social support groups offer a promising venue for breast cancer patients to take control of their self-definition and connect with individuals going through similar experiences. During the analysis of discussion board posts for an online breast cancer support group, ice cream unexpectedly emerged as a central component of group discussions. This included frequent sexual jokes about the deliverymen that brought the women ice cream. A grounded theory analysis revealed that ice cream symbolized the pursuit of everyday, physical desires, which allowed group members to construct a joyful, but forthright, shared identity. This paper demonstrates how online support groups can enable individuals facing a health crisis to use seemingly trivial symbols to take control over their self-definition.

The #GamerGate Files

The GamerGate controversy exploded in late 2014 and seemed to pit feminist game critics against misogynistic male gamers who were defending their territory. GamerGate has been filled with intense anger on all sides, and has even resulted in threats of murder and rape. This chapter attempts to explain why so much hostility erupted over what appears to some to be a feminist critique of gaming and to others to be a misogynist-gamer critique of feminism. At heart is a surprising debate about mainstream gaming vs. indie gaming, and discomfort over changes to the notion of what counts as gaming and who counts as a gamer. The authors use online ethnographic methods to piece together the various elements of this cultural narrative from the online and social media contexts where it unfolded.

It's No Secret Justin Wants to Be Black

Research shows that media representations of race, gender and social class designed for consumption by the millennial generation create a world of symbolic equality via narratives of racial harmony, female empowerment and forms of exaggeration where everyone seems to have a middle and or upper middle class quality of life. In general, the changing face of diversity as represented in media has been cast as a neoliberal politic, where ideologies of free markets are extended into representing a sense of equality among individuals and their respective social groups. While scholars have investigated exaggerated representations of inclusivity in a variety of media genres, there is limited scholarship investigating the ways in which comedy serves the neoliberalist agenda. Comedy Central's Roast of Justin Bieber aired March 2015 and has been replicated in multiple forms. The current study is an in depth discourse and content analysis of the racial and gender jokes appearing in this program. It concludes that what appears to be a move beyond race is instead working against a post-race reality.

Nothing Random about Taste

In our digital age, “Is there an app for that?” gets asked and answered for books, but not the canon, until the invention of an online, tessellating medium of personal choice expansion called TasteKid. Its voter-influenced algorithm continuously updates users' personalized canons seeded from whatever writer or title they choose. This atypical engendering of literacy challenges—perhaps inadvertently—what the canon is and how it can be experienced for readers new to critical or cultural literacy and Toni Morrison fans alike. In fact, her works get linked to other media by the thumbs up or down responses of site visitors. In this way, technology eclipses the canon's previous assumption of “the center” because only a reader's choice can occupy it. Likewise, with the distance between authors decreasing, (at the pace of the site visitors' unpredictable orders), the obsolescence of “margins” effects a power shift.

The Personalized and Personal “Mass” Media – From “We-Broadcast” to “We-Chat”

China's two major social media, the microblog Weibo and the messaging service WeChat have played important roles in representing citizens' voices and bringing about social changes. They often grow an ordinary event into a national debate as in the case of the Bi Fujian incident. They have also turned ordinary Chinese citizens into amateur reporters, empowering them to influence on issues that matter to them. An equalizer of power and discourse opportunity, the personalized and personal social media “weapons” are delivering the much needed social justice and consolation to the Chinese citizens amid widespread injustice, inequality, hypocrisy, indifference and corruption in the Chinese society.

Embodying Difference on YouTube

This chapter analyzes the content and responses of a popular video, “Shit Asian Dads Say,” produced by YouTube production company JustKiddingFilms. In analyzing video content in conjunction with themes emerging from comments left in response to the video, the chapter discusses the ways in which comedic/satirical, citizen-produced content on YouTube helps to shape, construct, and reflect the boundaries of group membership. As the video hinges on second-generation performances of immigrant parenthood, its content provides a prime site to investigate how age, gender and race are performed and become contested or reified in digital space. An analysis of the YouTube videos grounded in the responses, commentary and discussion that accompany the videos in the user comments, ultimately empowers viewers' interpretations of digital creative expression.

The Electric Soul

This chapter will use media ecology, and rhetorical theories of ideology construction and social intervention to look at the ways that contemporary digital media interact with religious and spiritual practices in order to inform and create identities. This chapter will examine the ideology construction that occurs in the Crosswire.org applications, specifically PocketSword designed for the iPhone/iPad and AndBible designed for Android devices. This chapter will also look at the ideology construction and identity creation in the English language section of onislam.net, a website designed to help English-speaking Muslims live out their faith. Finally the chapter will consider Osel Shen Phen Ling, a website designed for “Practicing Buddhadharma in the Tibetan Gelugpa Tradition”.

The Self of the Camera

This chapter examines the revolution in self-representation across the cyber-space engendered by the advent of new interactive social medias. It argues that in the attempt to face the challenges of self-imaging in everyday life and in an era where discourses of “identities in flux” have become the norm, photographic trends on Facebook usage seek to portray a sense of coherence of the self through popular media practices. In this dimension, the new media spaces have provided a propitious space of autobiographic self-showing-narrating through a mixture of photos/texts in a way that deconstructs the privileges of self-narration hitherto available only to a privileged class of people. The self (and primarily the face) has thus become subject to a dynamic of personal and amateurish artistic practices that represent, from an existentialist perspective, the daily practices of self-making, un-making and re-making in articulating one's (social) being.

The Roles of Age, Gender, and Ethnicity in Cyberbullying

Children and adolescents have become active users of electronic technologies, with many of them blogging, watching videos, and chatting via instant messenger and social networking sites. Many of these activities have become a typical part of their lives. Electronic technologies have brought many conveniences to the lives of children and adolescents. Along with the opportunities associated with these technologies, children and adolescents are also susceptible to risks, including cyberbullying. Therefore, many researchers have become concerned with identifying which factors might predict children's and adolescents' involvement in these behaviors. Some predictors that researchers have focused on include age, gender, and ethnicity, but the findings were mixed. This chapter draws on research to review studies on the relationship of age, gender, and ethnicity to children's and adolescents' cyberbullying involvement and concludes with solutions and recommendations as well as future directions for research focused on these predictors and cyberbullying.

Social Media Affordances and the Capital of Queer Self-Expression

This chapter presents an overview of the September 2014 controversy surrounding Facebook's enforcement of their “real name policy,” the disproportionate targeting of drag performers for profile suspension, and the queer community's brief exodus to the network Ello. By drawing on research about identity in the online age, queer and subcultural theory, and the concept of affordances in social media, the author seeks to illuminate some of the causes of this incident, and the motivations of the actors involved. The online profile is framed as a locus for the construction of alternative identities—particularly those which challenge gender norms—as well as tension when that process is restricted. The author attempts to locate this concept of profiles, and the networked communities built from them, within a larger web of capital relations, exploring how the online and offline intersect therein.