P.J. Patella-Rey

University of Pittsburgh | Pitt · Gender Sexuality & Women's Studies

This dissertation begins with the assumption that the porn industry has radically changed in ways we are yet to fully understand. Drawing on interviews and auto-ethnography, it attempts to offer three distinct theoretical lenses through which these changes can be observed. First, I examine what is bought and sold in cam rooms, concluding that the w...

This panel explores digital pleasures that arise through the entanglement of bodies and digital technologies. Focusing on the digital structures and affordances that facilitate seeking, receiving and giving pleasure we analyse the ways in which intimacy is not only interactive, but also profoundly embodied. Haraway’s work in particular highlights t...

Activists and legal scholars seeking remedies to non-consensual pornography (known colloquially as ‘revenge porn’) have generally framed it as a violation of privacy; however, the concept of privacy a fraught history, linked to women’s exclusion from the public sphere, denial of their sexual expression, and impunity for abusers. I argue that the co...

What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of “gamification.” What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification.” As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from game...

The turn of the twenty-first century has been called "the Digital "and not without reason. In (post-)industrial nations, most young adults between the ages of 18 and 22 cannot remember a time when computers, cell phones, and the Web were not common features of their cultural landscape. Today we have profoundly intimate relationships not just th rou...

Online social networks targeted toward national priorities such as disaster planning, crime watch, or food safety are increasingly described in research studies. A central research challenge is to understand the determinants of the successful growth of such communities. The use of a visual analytics tool would guide the community managers to unders...

Social-media-supported academic conferences are becoming increasingly global as people anywhere can participate actively through backchannel conversation. It can be challenging for the conference organizers to integrate the use of social media, to take advantage of the connections between backchannel and front stage, and to encourage the participan...

This article is a critical examination of how capitalism has adapted to the explosion of websites devoted to user-generated content (commonly referred to as social media or Web 2.0). The author proceeds by reviewing how Marx applies the concepts of alienation and exploitation to his paradigmatic example (i.e., the factory); the author then attempts...

Sarah Ford's recent article, ‘Reconceptualizing the Public/Private Distinction in the Age of Information Technology’ demonstrates how social media shifts our understanding of privacy and publicity and proposes a continuum model instead of a simple dichotomy. In this commentary, we argue that Ford's proposed model does not go far enough to break dow...

Substantive Studies of ConsumptionTheories of ConsumptionDissatisfaction in an Age of AbundanceChoice and FreedomThe Sociology of Consumption and the “Great Recession”Conclusion References

This paper presents a three-part experiment designed to investigate the motivations of users of a community safety and neighborhood watch social networking website. The experiment centers around an intervention into the invitation system that current users employ to invite nonmembers to join the site, and involves several versions of an invitation...

George Ritzer (2010) recently conceptualized globalization in terms of liquidity and, especially, flows. This conceptualization is largely rooted in Zygmunt Bauman's theory of a world dominated by increasing liquidity. However, neither Bauman nor Ritzer put these ideas in the context of their intellectual genealogy. This essay seeks to do that by r...