Collaborative domestication

This article proposes an extension to domestication theory by introducing the concept of collaborative domestication, which we define as the ongoing mutual influence and interdependence of technology users in specific interactional contexts. This concept arose from our investigation of how patients integrate healthcare-related video consultations into their daily lives. In Denmark, the Covid-19 pandemic has expedited the implementation of video consultations in general practice, yet little is known about their use in this context. To address this, we conducted 13 interviews with patients and analysed the interviews from the perspective of domestication theory. We find that the general practitioner plays a central role throughout patients’ domestication processes, and the doctor–patient relationship significantly influences how patients experience video consultations. We argue that there is a collaborative aspect to domesticating video consultations that needs to be considered in both future studies and the ongoing implementation of video consultations

Mål, middel og tid – om livsformsanalysen som metode til at studere tilgangen til nyheder og aktualitetsstof

Denne artikel beskæftiger sig med danskernes opfattelse af nyheder. I modsætning til gængse studier af danskernes nyhedsbrug graver den et spadestik dybere og undersøger forskellige befolkningsgruppers opfattelser af nyheder: hvad ser man som nyheder, og hvilken rolle spiller de i dagliglivet og forholdet til andre borgere og samfundet. Undersøgelsen er baseret på dybdegående interviews med 101 borgere og et efterfølgende survey blandt 2000 tilfældigt udvalgte respondenter. I undersøgelsen vises det, at kendte faktorer som uddannelse, social status og familieforhold kun i nogen omfang forklarer forskellige tilgange til nyheder. I stedet er forholdet afhængigt af en lang række personlige og hverdagslige faktorer. Derfor forsøger vi med begreber om mål, middel og tid hentet fra Thomas Højrups livsformsanalyse at genanalysere vores materiale. Vi finder, at mål-middel-relationen og især forholdet til tid (og manglende tid) er afgørende faktorer i at forklare forskellige tilgange til nyheder. Til sidst i artiklen går vi tilbage og reflekterer over livsformsanalysens anvendelighed til at supplere eksisterende tilgange til studiet af nyheder og giver bud på fremtidige anvendelser i konkrete projekter. NØGLEORD:

The mediatization of self-tracking

This article investigates a community of men who use the pharmaceuticals Minoxidil and Finasteride to enable and restore beard and hair growth, and who track and trace the effects on YouTube. It argues that the traditional positions of expert and patient are deterritorialized by the digitalization of health discourses and practices, and that the camera in these YouTube videos acts as a mediating/performative factor. The article seeks to answer the question of community formation among the male self-trackers. It offers a generic, analytical model where knowledge production is outlined as either expert or practitioner and community formation as either community member or community leader, both of which figure as intersecting axes on a continuum. Although derived from the case material, the article suggests that the generic, analytical model works across different audiovisually mediated selftracking communities and practices.

The bodies of the (digitized) body

OnlyFans has enjoyed increasing attention from media and from users and consumers, especially since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and particularly amongst Internet-savy emerging adults. We used semi-structured interviews to collect testimonies from young Italian women (N = 20) who sell their own sexual(ised) content on OnlyFans and processed them through Th ematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Through this process, we sought to explore how different bodies are conceptualised in relation to content production, and how labour takes somatic existence in multiple ways. We looked at 1) how the body is prepared to be presented and mediatised, 2) how its presentation is conceptualised and actualised, and 3) how that work of representation, as a work of networking and therefore where bodily energy is invested and expended. Through this, we show how there are multiple, concurrent, and at times contradictory, narratives about corporality, and that potency and healing coexist alongside exhaustion.

Sexualized, platformed female bodies in male online practices

Sexualized images of the bodies of girls and young women – in some cases taken without the knowledge of those depicted, in other cases exchanged as part of erotic or romantic interactions – sometimes turn up in closed groups on social media and on websites and other online platforms. In their efforts to mark and prove masculinity, the (presumably) male participants in these fora share, trade, and evaluate such imagery. The young women depicted are generally commented upon in condescending ways. Based on a combination of digital ethnography and analogue fieldwork and interviews at a vocational school in Denmark, this article explores how boys and young men use sexualized female bodies to negotiate boundaries of masculinity, gendered positioning, and intimacy. Through new materialist and poststructuralist perspectives, we attend to the entanglements of social and technological phenomena enacting these practices.

Materializing

The present article explores how cycles are brought into being through the practices and affordances involved in period-tracking with apps. Based on thirteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with period-tracking app users living in the Netherlands, it expands on literature discussing the relationship between embodiment, apps, and quantification. The contributions of this article are two-fold. Theoretically, it argues for the use of Karen Barad’s notion of apparatus to understand how bodies are (re)configured in relation to self-tracking technologies (1998). Empirically, it exposes how bodies emerge in localized period-tracking practices, within material-semiotic arrangements that both resist and reproduce cultural ideals about menstruating bodies. Period-tracking with apps, this study finds, brings the body’s interior processes into being in a “systematic” way, (re)configuring the cycle as either a series of phases or an interval with a certain (normative) duration. In all cases, periodtracking with apps becomes a means for users to access their internal body and to materialize the invisible processes of the cycle in ways that can be acted upon.

Regarding the Mains of Others.

The platformed logics of social media favor unique and spectacular content and thus encourage the production and display of unique and spectacular bodies. In the realm of social media, attractive and unattainable bodies have emerged as the norm rather than the exception. This article, however, sets out to investigate how a specific type of spectacular body comes into being by turning to the phenomenon of mukbangs. We explore how excessive food consumption, audiovisual aesthetics, media technologies, and platform logics all become constituents of the spectacular body’s performance. Our analysis will focus on two tendencies: First, the platformed body is distributed and comes into being through its entanglement with nonhuman agents, such as the microphone enhancing eating sounds, the camera and image composition displaying the food’s excessive quantity, and the food’s entanglement with the body through a spectacle of excess. Second, mukbang videos cater to a spectating body ready to be affected by the exceptional body capable of extreme eating and how this bodily performance transcends the medium, and the videos produce disgust or cravings.

Collective, unruly, and becoming

Online contexts offer an important source of information and emotional support for those facing involuntary childlessness. This article reports the results from an ethnographic exploration of TTC (trying-to-conceive) communication on Instagram. Through a new materialist approach that pays attention to the web of intraacting agencies in online communication, this article explores the question of what material-discursive bodies (constructs of embodiment and medical information) emerge in TTC communication as the result of shared images and narratives of bodies, symptoms, fertility treatments, and reproductive technologies. Drawing on a lengthy ethnographic immersion, observations of 394 Instagram accounts, and the close analysis of 100 posts, the study found that TTC communication produces collective, unruly, and becoming bodies. Collective bodies reflect collectively acquired, solidified, and contested medical knowledge and bodies produced in TTC communication. Unruly bodies are bodies that do not conform to standard medical narratives. Becoming bodies are marked by their shifting agency, such as pregnant or fetal bodies.