Katrin Tiidenberg

• PhD
• Professor at Tallinn University

This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com. By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds of conflicts that arise around how selfies and images are used. These are about: (a) reactions to photo-shopped i...

This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through in...

Odes to Heteronormativity: Presentations of Femininity in Russian-Speaking Pregnant Women’s Instagram Accounts

Sex is central to the internet. It exists everywhere online and yet is everywhere constrained, sanitized, normalized, and invisibilized. This panel will investigate the ways in which sex seeps, spills, and oozes across boundaries, both online and off, despite efforts to control and limit its impact beyond consumer capitalism. Author 1 examines onli...

This paper makes an argument for the value of including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media. Building on interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi and Libertine.Center) devoted to nudity, sex, and kink, it examines the implications of def...

A growing body of academic work on internet governance focuses on the “deplatforming of sex,” or the removal and suppression of sexual expression from the internet. Often, this is linked to the 2018 passing of FOSTA/SESTA – much-criticized twin bills that make internet intermediaries liable for content that promotes or facilitates prostitution or s...

Building on a study of three Nordic and Baltic digital sexual platforms, this article analyzes the perceptions of enjoyable sex and sexual belonging among 60 people, who self-identify as sexually liberal. In dialogue with Gayle Rubin’s formative work on sexual hierarchies and “good sex,” we explore our participants’ complex and often ambiguous sexu...

A growing body of academic work on internet governance focuses on the ‘deplatforming of sex’, or the removal and suppression of sexual expression from the internet. Often, this is linked to the 2018 passing of FOSTA/SESTA – much-criticized twin bills that make internet intermediaries liable for content that promotes or facilitates prostitution or s...

General purpose social media platforms—often incited by American legislation—increasingly exclude sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety. This article analyzes interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi, and Libertine.Center...

This article explores diasporic activist memory narration on social media. We analyze the multimodal content and comments on the Instagram account “Armenians in Lebanon” (AiL), Instagram’s affordances, and interview data with their social media manager to understand how memory is narrated, how specific audiences respond to it, and how Instagram as...

Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish p...

This article analyzes platform governance and platform power through the lens of deplatforming sex, and deplatforming of sex through the lens of concentration of norm and infrastructure power. Based on a meta-analysis of ethnographic, interview and social media data associated with cases of deplatforming and replatforming sex on social media, the a...

Contributing to the swiftly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this panel explores the geosocial and geopolitical dimensions of digital sexual cultures by zooming in on the connections between sexual practices, geographic imaginaries, and locally embedded social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Building on case s...

Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each...

Aasta 2020 oli kogu maailmas pandeemia-aasta. Eestis oli aga lisaks ka kultuuriministeeriumi välja kuulutatud digikultuuriaasta. Nende kahe koostoime oli ootamatu, aga oluline: pandeemia tõi esile nii digikultuuri tähtsuse kui ka ka vajakajäämised selle korralduses ja kättesaadavuses, laiemalt tulid esile puudused valdkondlikus poliitikaloomes. Ees...

Edited By Annette N. Markham and Katrin Tiidenberg What happens when the internet is absorbed into everyday life? How do we make sense of something that is invisible but still so central? A group of digital culture experts address these questions in Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity. Twenty years ago, the internet was ima...

This panel builds on a recently funded research project on the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden, and Finland (2020-2022) investigating three local online platforms devoted to communities around nudity and kink: iha.ee, darkside.se, and alastonsuomi.com. Our case studies are in a sense “edge cases” which partly move within s...

Although sex an essential part of the human experience, there are increasing attempts to remove it from social media. This paper brings together two researchers’ extensive research (~ 50 total interviews between 2011 and 2020, an extended 2011 to 2018 ethnography with a community of NSFW bloggers on Tumblr, and a year-long observation of multiple s...

This article investigates the mediatization of neo-Paganism by analyzing how Estonian witches use Facebook groups and Messenger and how Facebook’s affordances shape the neo-Paganism practiced in those spaces. This is a small-scale exploratory study based on ethnographic interviews and observational data. To understand the mediatization of neo-Pagan...

This paper has two objectives: to explicate the sociotechnical conditions that facilitate critique on social media platforms (specifically: Tumblr); and to operationalize a “working theory” from Foucault’s conceptualization of critique. We analyze resistant practices observed (in ethnographic study) in a Not Safe For Work (NSFW) community on Tumblr...

This article explores the experiences and practices of self-identifying female sexual age-players. Based on interviews and observation of the age players’ blogged content, the article suggests that, rather than being fixed in one single position, our study participants move between a range of roles varying across their different scenes. In examinin...

This chapter addresses the impossible situations, decisions, and what-if imagi- naries researchers are faced with daily, especially if undertaking qualitative and/or internet research and/or with vulnerable populations and/or on sensitive topics. It aligns with voices arguing that standardized procedural research ethics are inad- equate, and builds...

This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists’ perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn, situated in how activists understand the broader Estonian LGBT community, and Estonian society’s historico-politica...

This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Specia...

This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual...

How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how...

This article develops and troubles existing approaches to visual self-representation in social media, questioning the naturalized roles of faces and bodies in mediated self-representation. We argue that self-representation in digital communication should not be treated as synonymous with selfies, and that selfies themselves should not be reductivel...

This article analyzes how pregnant women perform their pregnancies on Instagram. We ask whether they rely on and reproduce pre-existing discourses aimed at morally regulating pregnancy, or reject them and construct their own alternatives. Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly stalke...

This article analyses Estonian youth's perceptions of their own political participation and their practices of participation on social media. We analysed 60 interviews with Estonian informants in a MYPLACE study and relied on a conceptual broadening that acknowledges the political potential of everyday. We relay on theories of standby citizenship a...

Despite the growing visibility of sonogram pictures online, there are as yet few critical explorations into how prenatal “digital birth” generates new ways of conceptualizing pregnancy, parenthood, and (digital) life course of children. This chapter aims to contribute to this nascent area of inquiry by addressing some of the ways in which the fetus...

In this chapter we explore the potential of specific online communities as sites and tools of transition. Our analysis is based on ethnographic data from an NSFW (Not Safe for Work)2 community on the Tumblr social media site. Using selfies (photos taken of oneself by oneself, usually using a smartphone or a webcam and shared on social media), blogs...

This paper is based on visual narrative analysis of cyber-ethnographic material from a 2.5 year field-research with 'not safe for work' [NSFW] bloggers and self-shooters on tumblr.com. I use Koskela's concept of 'empowering exhibitionism', Waskul's 'erotic looking glass', and Foucault's 'technologies of the self' to analyze self-shooting (taking ph...