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#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States
American Ethnologist
Abstract
As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.”
... The episode references criticism of social media advocacy, sometimes known as hashtag activism (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). Nish exclaims, "Even the protestors got bored after a while…they just moved on to the next viral miscarriage of justice they can hang a hashtag off of." ...
... Social media can powerfully shape public opinion regarding violence (Carlyle, 2017). Bonilla and Rosa (2015) note that with the increased use of technologies, such as cell phones with recording capabilities, marginalized populations have tools for documenting state-sanctioned violence and providing counternarratives of marginalized communities. For instance, in 2014, there were 8 million tweets (#Ferguson) after 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. ...
... For instance, in 2014, there were 8 million tweets (#Ferguson) after 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Despite these active efforts to communicate information and bring awareness to social injustices, it is hard to estimate the long-lasting effects of digital activism (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). During the final scene, Nish mentions how protestors gave up on her father's case (i.e., fighting for his innocence or exoneration) and "moved onto the next hashtag." ...
Black Mirror has not shied away from narratives regarding the criminal legal system, offending behavior, and criminal/deviant behavior. The third act of the Black Mirror episode entitled Black Museum focuses on Clayton Leigh, a Black man on death row. Leigh relinquished consciousness to a scientist named Rolo Haynes before his execution, and the hologram image serves as the main attraction for the museum when patrons begin flocking to the museum for the opportunity to electrocute Leigh. This review paper aims to discuss how Black Museum serves as an allegory for the exploitation of Black people through discussing the underlying themes of dehumanization through the minimization of their pain and the amplification of toxic masculinity.
... One especially important set of theoretical tools to help us follow language in the production of context is work on the ways people create connections between two or more instances of discourse Silverstein 2005;Wortham and Reyes 2015). Analyses of such interdiscursive relationships are crucial to understanding how the present moment can become imbricated with multiple and sometimes conflicting ways of understanding what the relevant context is and who does and does not belong (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). For example, Dick's (2011b) analysis of anti-migrant ordinances in US municipalities shows that these ordinances gain political legitimacy and have racializing effects on Mexican migrants because of their interdiscursive links with US federal immigration law, which has marginalized Mexican migrants since the late 19th century. ...
... The study of digitally mediated communication introduces new complexities into anthropological conversations about what a fieldsite can be (Constable 2003;Horst and Miller 2012;Bonilla and Rosa 2015). The constitution of digital spaces can be ethnographically investigated by examining how participants orient to technologies of communication, highlighting the ideologies that underlie processes of site construction. ...
... Gershon's work (2010Gershon's work ( , 2012 on media ideologies reveals that assumptions about the differences or similarities between online and offline sites have important social boundary-making functions. Similarly, in exploring the use of Twitter in the Black Lives Matter movement, Bonilla and Rosa (2015) argue that Twitter provides a space for transformative racial politics and can be investigated as a virtual fieldsite. Moreover, recent anthropological approaches to digital ethnography have called for research that explores the interconnections between digital and analog fieldsites (Akkaya 2014;Androutsopoulos and Juffermans 2014), thus seeking to understand not only the production of borders between sites but also the processes by which sites can become linked to one another. ...
... This is where we learn about the difference between online activism and traditional activism. In general, activism refers to the idea of the masses who stand up together and challenge the authorities or their oppressors concerning whatever the issue might be that affects everyone (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). An example of this is the Fees Must Fall movement which is a student political movement whereby students challenged the authorities and raised certain issues about the fees and decolonization of the universities in South Africa (Bosch 2016). ...
... Digital media refers to the use of computers, laptops, or smartphones in the contemporary world (Castell, 2001). The hashtag refers to the use of the hashtag sign as a trend about a particular issue that needs serious attention (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). In South Africa, the protest was a clear example of both online and offline (traditional) activism where university students all over South Africa engaged in protest and addressed the issue of fees which affected many students, especially those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds (Bosch, 2016). ...
... According to Castell, the internet has impacted sociability because people communicate or often interact more online in the contemporary world (Castell, 2001). Online activism, also known as digital protest (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015), demonstrates that through social media, people become more connected on various issues that draw them closer to each other. The use of hashtags, the 13 internet, and technology altogether also shows the power of social media and the influence it has on culture in the 21st century (Castell, 2001;Murphie and Potts, 2003;Wilson, 2006;Bosch, 2016). ...
... Developments in all social movements are multifaceted and complex, and involve economic, social, cultural, and regional dimensions (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015;Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015). For this reason, digital activism is the subject of several disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, behavioral and political science, as well as media and communication. ...
... This finding shows that digital activism practices and research in the USA are of great interest to a wide range of scholars. Although the American Ethnologist is not among top journals that publish the most articles on digital activism, the study by Bonilla and Rosa (2015) published in the journal is the most referenced in the literature. The assumption behind co-citation analysis is that publications that are frequently cited together are thematically similar. ...
This study aims to examine global research trends in the field of digital activism by analyzing publication outputs, co-citations, co-occurrences, and collaborations among countries. Data from 2000 to March 2024 were extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database and analyzed using R Studio. A total of 1,476 unique authors published 907 papers across 524 journals. The findings indicate that research on digital activism is predominantly published in Western European and American journals, highlighting a lack of diversity in terms of countries and regions. Most of the cited authors and publications originate from the United States. The rate of single-country publications (SCP) is higher than that of multi-country publications (MCP) in all publishing countries, suggesting that authors of digital activism prefer to collaborate with colleagues from their own countries. The annual growth rate in this area is 10%. The most cited studies collected data from microblogging sites and employed content analysis techniques. Our results outline the current state of research and emphasize the necessity of integrating various disciplines while also acknowledging the contributions of developing countries for future advancements.
... It has become a new means of giving voice to the public on social media [14]. "Hashtag" means when people post content with #, to draw attention to a specific event [15]. As a way of organizing aggregation of information, using hashtag # to associate specific content or context created by users [16]. ...
Reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision has prompted a surge in digital activism and public discourse on Twitter. This study utilizes MDCoR to analyze tweets, developing an immediate study with the #RoeVsWade hashtag following the Supreme Court's decision. The analysis reveals two predominant themes: abortion as a healthcare issue and abortion as a legal right. The first theme focuses on personal narratives and the medical necessity of abortion, while the second addresses the political and legal dimensions of reproductive rights. Sentiment analysis of the tweets indicates neutral to positive emotions in discussions around healthcare, with a more objective tone. Meanwhile, tweets concerning legal rights exhibit stronger subjectivity and emotional content, reflecting the deep ideological divides. The study underscores the vital role of online platforms in shaping public opinion and collective movements, providing insights into feminist activism trends in the digital age and their effect on social change.
... 40 Movements such as Standing Rock, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter had slowly built digital networks and communication strategies to address wider audiences. 41 Such channels received heightened attention in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd and other highly visible acts of state violence during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
This guest editors' introduction to the journal issue "Language Lives in Unexpected Places" contextualizes this special issue of American Indian Culture and Research Journal, an attempt to oppose ideas of disappearance through the continued reclamation of Indigenous languages. We connect this collection of papers with the publication of the special issue “American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places,” published previousely in this journal. The guest editors of that issue, Anthony Webster and Leighton Peterson, focused on the work of historian Philip Deloria, which highlights the ways perceptions of the “expected” and the “unexpected” of American Indians as well as linguistic anthropology’s attention to language inequalities and differing linguistic ideologies. Like Webster and Peterson’s earlier intervention, we seek “to place linguistic anthropology into meaningful dialogue with contemporary indigenous studies” (Webster and Peterson 2011). In this essay, we highlight some of the more recent themes and resonances between the disciplines and how the perspectives of linguistic anthropology can help us to theorize contemporary processes of settler colonialism, racism, and decolonization—both within and outside of academia.
... Alongside the uptake of the culture through visits to New York City, speakers are exposed to the culture via social media platforms like the former Twitter and Instagram, which also serve as sites for ethnographic fieldwork (Bonilla & Rosa 2015). Platforms like these are akin to virtual neighborhoods (Appaduari 1996), providing a window into the digital co-construction of personae. ...
Examining regional variation across African American communities has advanced research on African American English beyond its treatment as a singular, uniform variety. While the earlier focus on inner-city, and often male, youth prioritized studying these speakers’ production of ethnolectal patterns, less attention was paid to other language practices of these speakers and their broader semiotic construction of identity. Drawing on ethnographic data and sociolinguistic interviews from African American speakers from Rochester, New York who identify as Hood Kids , I examine how the bought vowel can become a marker of a particular place-identity in Rochester. I argue that the Hood Kid is an adequation of an enregistered racialized NYC persona that reanalyzes bought while also drawing on other emblems of Black, street culture. Such variation suggests that speakers’ conceptualization of race and place ideologically scales beyond immediately local geographic boundaries. (African American Language, style, race and ethnicity, regional variation)*
... Twitter has an automated following method that works like a subscription to other users' tweets. This distinguishes Twitter from other social media platforms, maintaining connections that already exist and promoting bidirectionality in its place (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). ...
This article explores the intricate dynamics of video gaming among the youth of Dhaka, Bangladesh, exploring its profound influence on socialization and community building within the framework of theories such as the Theory of Attainment, Imagined Community, User and Gratification Theory, and Bourdieu's concept of “social capital.” Through a comprehensive blend of digital and autoethnographic methods, the research unveils how gaming transcends its solitary image to emerge as a potent cultural force in Bangladeshi society. The findings underscore the pivotal role of gaming in forging social bonds and nurturing communities, both in virtual realms and physical spaces. Gamers actively engage in collaboration, strategic planning, and the exchange of experiences, mirroring the dynamics of real-world social networks. Despite concerns regarding addiction, the article illuminates the impact of video games on social cohesion among the youth demographic. Furthermore, it inquires into gaming culture's remarkable resilience in the face of societal norms and regulatory challenges, shedding light on the adaptive strategies employed by gamers to navigate and thrive in diverse contexts. By exploring the intricate interplay between virtual and real-life experiences, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how video games shape socialization among urban youth in the ever-evolving landscape of Bangladesh.
... Twitter has an automated following method that works like a subscription to other users' tweets. This distinguishes Twitter from other social media platforms, maintaining connections that already exist and promoting bidirectionality in its place (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). ...
In Saudi Arabia, it is illegal for women to constitute political parties, form civil society organizations, or participate in political demonstrations. Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia young women have had the chance to take advantage of social media's ability to bring sociopolitical change, to freely express themselves, fight for their rights, voice their opinions, and draw attention to and confront the country's oppressive political and social conditions for women, particularly the male guardianship system. The #EndMaleGuardianshipSystem Twitter campaign, which started in 2016, has received the most attention out of all the women's online campaigns in Saudi Arabia. Twitter's ability to organize, record, and publicize content has given young Saudi women the confidence to voice their social and political ideas and demands and to campaign against this system. This article assesses the communication tactics and online discourse used by Saudi young women in their hashtag activism against the male guardianship system while addressing the question: What kind of online discourse was produced and shared against the male guardianship system? For this purpose, an online observation was conducted for the الوالية( باسقاط نطالب سعوديات # [#EndMaleGuardianshipSystem]), where three thousand tweets were collected and analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method. The research led to the identification of three communication strategies that were used by Saudi women: (1) political soft and assertive communication strategy; (2) religious medium and persuasive communication strategy; and (3) social hard and educative communication strategy.
... As shown by Merlyna Lim (2002, the digital public sphere plays an important role in explaining the intersectionality between democracy, minority rights, and the discourse on religious freedom in contemporary Indonesia. The articles by Sarah Pink (2001Pink ( , 2015 and several other researchers specializing in digital ethnography (Barratt and Maddox 2016;Bonilla and Rosa 2015;Fuhrmann and Pfeifer 2020;Jurkiewicz 2018) have been helpful in gathering YouTubebased ethnographic data related to the articulation of Acehnese former Muslims converting to Christianity. I scrutinized twenty-seven YouTube videos describing the experiences of twelve Acehnese former Muslims (four men and eight women). ...
This study examines the public sphere and the formation of counterpublics based on the narratives of former Muslims from Aceh who converted to Christianity on YouTube. This study argues that in addition to strengthening the distinct attributes of Islamic identity in the public sphere, YouTube enables Acehnese former Muslims, as a subaltern community, to negotiate new social identities and share religious experiences after conversion. It also explores how Acehnese former Muslims challenge the dominant culture and restrictive regulations in Aceh, which perceive religious conversions as heresy and unlawful conduct. Data were collected using the digital ethnographic technique from four of the YouTube narratives of twelve Acehnese former Muslims who had converted to Christianity. The findings indicate that the online public sphere enhances the autonomy and their capacity to negotiate their Acehnese social identity, which is closely constructed with Islam. The presence of YouTube content thus contributes to strengthening the development of democracy and freedom of religious practice in Indonesia.
... Many academic articles and papers have examined how hashtag activism have the ability to drive a social movement forward and obtaining a strong foundation in the digital age (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015;Chang, n.d.;Khushbakht et al., 2021;Kirkwood et al., 2018;Lopez et al., 2019;Lukose, 2018;Worthington, Kirkwood et al., (2018) found that the tweets they collected were diverse with varying opinions about feminism (such as supporting, opposing, contradicting, uncertain, and impartial views etc.) although containing the same keywords. While their research was focused on gathering tweets from the United States and the United Kingdom, my study concentrated the same questions on Pakistan. ...
Study Background: Female activism has long existed in Pakistan but reached new heights during the #MeToo and #AuratMarch movements on Twitter. There is a consistent clash between those who mean to empower women and those who aim to discourage. Aim of Study: The aim of this study is to analyse Twitter’s mobilization in a society split between liberal and religio-political formations. Methodology: By employing a content analysis, 400 tweets were examined via manual deductive coding and evaluated to determine emerging perspectives of feminism in Pakistani community. Findings: The results showed a moderate effect in the opposite direction than hypothesized: Pakistani women are divided between liberal and Islamic feminism and therefore have not formed a unified entity. Furthermore, these movements only speak for those who orchestrated them: the elite-class. Conclusion: Women with weak economic and social backgrounds were completely omitted from these feminist demonstrations. This impacts the views held by other members of society on what feminism in Pakistan is meant to be and how its agendas need to be questioned.
... Social media platforms can also help the government and citizens keep in touch [12], and even in the face of extreme situations such as sudden disasters, the state can effectively disseminate political information, emergency warnings, or other information serving a social function [13,14]. Social media users can supervise the mainstream media and effectively record and question false statements [15]. ...
To explore the characteristics of mainstream media news that becomes virally disseminated on social media platforms, we first selected and coded 1100 reports from the official WeChat account of the People's Daily during the outbreak of the epidemic. Second, we comprehensively used single-factor analysis and binary logistic regression to analyze the factors affecting the recommendation rates. Finally, a nomogram scoring system was introduced into the field of social science research for the first time, and the predictive factors identified in the multivariate logistic regression results were used to construct a nomogram prediction model. The model consistency index was 78.77% [95% CI (0.693 ~ 0.833)]. The results show that the main factors affecting the persistence of news communication include the mode of presentation for news articles, the reporting region, emotional tone, writing style, and seriality. In particular, the news presented through all media is more likely to continue to spread. The nomogram prediction model constructed in this study has relatively good accuracy and discrimination. This research can provide a theoretical basis to guide the compilation of news for major streaming media on social media platforms.
... There are continuous debates on the impact of hashtag activism online versus real world action-taking (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015;Mihailidis, 2020); hence it is important to investigate the mechanism of collective action via CMC. ...
... The hashtag, identified by inserting a hash symbol (#) before a word or phrase, serves as a powerful tool on social media platforms for locating specific content (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). Individuals typically use hashtags in their posts to increase visibility, hoping that when others search for a particular word or phrase their posts will appear in the results. ...
Social media has become an integral part of daily life, particularly among youths, shaping interactions and influencing mental well-being. Unfortunately, this has also led to a rise in cyberbullying, particularly concerning the sharing of personal struggles, such as depression. Despite these challenges, some youths have adeptly navigated social media to promote mental health awareness and activism. However, a subset of these activists has become popular influencers, sometimes prioritising maintaining their online status over their advocacy roles. Consequently, there is a concern that some may inadvertently glorify or romanticise depression to sustain their popularity. In this article, I explore the influence of social media on mental health activism, focusing on its effects on the mental well-being of youths. I examine whether the portrayal of depression by influencers or mental health activists contributes positively to destigmatisation efforts or if it inadvertently perpetuates misconceptions. The data were collected from the different social media platforms of nine participants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted for an in-depth understanding of the mined data. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The themes that emanated from the findings were: disguised “activism” and killing two birds with one stone, increased popularity versus activism, and irrelevant content. The study highlights the importance of investigating the impact of social media on mental health activism by recognising the potential implications on the mental well-being of youths. Social media influencers aim to change perceptions of depression, but there is still a growing concern whether the proposed new image of depression is helpful or misleading.
... Nationalism embodied these influences and rallied individuals around a singular symbol, fostering a feeling of honor, acceptance, and dedication to the imagined shared benefits of the nation. Lately, scholarship on digital media has raised questions about the ability of online space to bring about a "participatory culture" [50] where formerly marginalized voices have the capacity to create alternative social and political communities [51]- [53]. Facebook, specifically, has been recognized for its involvement in recent political movements, enabling new "netizens" to actively engage in democratic politics [54]. ...
... There are continuous debates on the impact of hashtag activism online versus real world action-taking (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015;Mihailidis, 2020); hence it is important to investigate the mechanism of collective action via CMC. ...
... There are continuous debates on the impact of hashtag activism online versus real world action-taking (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015;Mihailidis, 2020); hence it is important to investigate the mechanism of collective action via CMC. ...
This article situates the contested terrain of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the current political and cultural context, analyzing how social media users employ visual strategies to reinforce, challenge, and reimagine dominant discourses on DEI. By examining a range of case studies, we offer a critical look at how technological affordances enable the proliferation of viral memes, individual performances, and emotionally charged imagery that shape perceptions of DEI initiatives. Finally, we investigate the tactics users employ to collectively construct counter‐narratives, effectively “talking back” to hegemonic framings of DEI.
Using two empirical examples – one from northern Sweden and one from eastern Chad – this chapter discusses possibilities for anthropological research into complex socio-technological and ecological relationships and interdependencies that arise and become effective in the course of digitalization processes. Summarized under the term „datafied (environmental) worlds“, these entanglements are understood as dynamic, multifaceted and generative. „Datafied“ refers to the aspect that they are never only digital in character and emphasizes their material and local dimensions and effects. Accordingly, the anthropology of datafied (environmental) worlds is conceived less as an independent field of research, but rather as a lens and perspective that can be used to research various (not merely digital) processes and phenomena and can be realized through the methodological approach of „follow the wire“ proposed here.
During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, players on Iran's national team avoided singing the national anthem before their first match. This was interpreted as an expression of solidarity with the ongoing protests in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman arrested for opposing the country's mandatory hijab requirements. This study focuses on how regular users and government propaganda social media accounts sought to shape the political and sporting narratives surrounding these protests. A total of 20,470 tweets and 33,535 frames composed the sample, revealing stark differences between anti-regime and pro-regime communities in nearly all frames, except for a frame combining football and international politics. The implications of protest framing and the use of social media as a form of resistance and reinterpretation are discussed.
In the Spring of 2020, a White police officer was witnessed kneeling for nine consecutive minutes on the neck of a Black African American man, George Floyd. This was filmed by a passer-by and posted online as one of the many examples of police brutality against Black people in America. This footage quickly garnered attention throughout the United States and struck a chord with people of all races across the globe. Something about seeing this brutality so clearly made it difficult for people to ignore, creating a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement which had originally been created in 2013 in response to the murder of African American teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. This article outlines why despite the monumental imprint these marches had on British and American society and history, this potential moment for revolutionary structural change did not come to fruition. It explores how measures have been implemented to deliberately weaken progress towards social justice, using tactics such as moral panic and colour-blind rhetoric, depoliticising of teaching, and utilising social media and legislation to suppress and censor activists and protestors.
Based on 32 in-depth interviews with black women, this paper analyzes the racialized and gendered impact of vicarious exposure to police encounters on social media. We draw from Smith’s (2016) sequelae to describe the lingering effects of anti-black state violence, particularly grief and mourning. For Black women, the manifestation of sequelae from online exposure includes: a) amplification of police brutality, b) identification with victims, c) expressions of grief, and d) prolonged mourning. We argue research should contend with the digital landscape when examining psychological effects of police violence to understand anti-black police violence’s impact on gendered racial mental health disparities.
Since the global virality of the ‘Renegade’ dance on TikTok and beyond in 2020, concerns regarding the erasure of Black girls have been noted. This paper extends the conversation by considering how Black girls and teenagers may continue to wrestle with visibility and suppression even within a more intimate in-group community of Black TikTokers. In this paper, we assemble an original corpus of TikTok posts purposively sampled from #BlackGirlTikTok and apply content analysis guided by critical technocultural discourse analysis. Our findings reveal that the dominant discourse on #BlackGirlTikTok focused on embodied self-care (i.e. body and beauty care, health and wellness) and Black popular culture (i.e. audio memes, parlance), constituting a niche community for users to commune. However, despite the nomenclature of the hashtag, the users dominating the community were overtly Black women rather than Black girls or teenagers, thus raising issues of visibility, competition, and suppression within the in-group community.
This chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological foundations for this book, beginning with the overarching social-political problem of how to address educational inequity in the context of an enormous and persistent nationwide gap between the racial diversity of the student body and their home communities with the racial homogeneity of the teacher corps. We argue that the overwhelming Whiteness of education in the United States, including prospective and in-service teacher populations, coupled with the paucity of teachers of color, requires us to restructure teacher education to prepare White teachers for the practice of anti-racist education. We conclude the chapter with a brief description of our research project and an overview of the book.
O objetivo deste ensaio é explorar os padrões de antinegritude nos jogos contemporâneos. Os videogames funcionam como locais de lógicas necropolíticas que utilizam a morte negra para impulsionar narrativas. Mais preocupante ainda é o fato de que esses jogos podem dar sentido a desejos mais amplos de supremacia colonial branca, tentando apagar e destruir seu passado racialmente problemático. Observações etnográficas também indicam que o ambiente dos jogos reflete uma lógica carcerária, buscando vigiar, policiar e criminalizar a negritude. Nessas condições, é imperativo examinar como a continuidade da instituição da escravidão dentro das práticas policiais está ativamente incorporada nas práticas técnicas e digitais, levando a condições carcerárias para aqueles submetidos ao seu poder, e os jogos oferecem um caminho para analisar essa tendência.
Ovaj se rad temelji na istraživanju u čijem je fokusu bilo istražiti urbani prijepor i naracije straha nastalih od mobilne infrastrukture u zagrebačkom naselju. Pri tome su primijenjeni teorijski postulati antropologije infrastrukture i zagađenja, polazeći od relacijske dimenzije infrastrukture i čovjeka, odnosno društvenih efekata infrastrukture. Budući da su naracije straha ispoljene putem prosvjeda i drugih aktivnosti, ovaj je fenomen sagledan kroz prizmu spontanog ekološkog aktivizma koji je prerastao u oblik digitalnog aktivizma. Umjesto ideje tehnološkog napretka i olakšanja života stanarima tog naselja, mobilna infrastruktura simbolizirala je nekontrolirano zračenje. Tehnologija je percipirana kao oblik nadzora nad ljudima, mehanizam upravljanja, direktnog narušavanja intime te vrsta biokontrole. Metodologiju rada čini medijska etnografija, tj. diskurzivna analiza kiberprostora –medijskih portala i YouTube kanala “Kvart Vrbani”. Rezultati istraživanja provedenog 2023. godine pokazali su da je nerazumijevanje elektromagnetskog zračenja predstavljalo ključni razlog zbog kojeg je pokrenut protest građana, da je nužna bolja javna komunikacija znanstvenika te komunikacija javnih donositelja odluka sa zajednicom prilikom smještanja mobilne infrastrukture u određeno područje, točnije sudjelovanje zajednice u donošenju odluka. Znanstveni doprinos ovog istraživanja očituje se u promatranju infrastrukture kao velikog, nedovoljno istraženog područja pomoću kojeg se može doći do novih uvida o premreženosti znanstveno-tehnoloških imaginarija i kulturnih, političkih te ekonomskih praksi u nekoj zajednici.
This article focuses on the interconnections between online and offline activism in Palestine, with a detailed analysis of the case of Sheikh Jarrah (east Jerusalem). We examine current strategies of Palestinian digital resistance that have highlighted the relevance of interlinking struggles both at the grassroots level and on the internet. Within the settler colonial framework, the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah stands as one of the most emblematic contemporary struggles against the Israeli military occupation, particularly against the ongoing evictions taking place in areas such as Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. In recent years, this hashtag has drawn unprecedented global attention to the Palestinian cause. This article is based on extensive digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews with young Palestinian activists conducted from 2021 to 2023. Through an exploration of activists’ narratives surrounding the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement, we critically examine the interplay of diverse forms of resistance in the age of social media. Our lens of analysis links grassroots and online struggles, offering a fresh perspective on digital activism in the current discourse on culture and communication within Palestinian studies.
This chapter explores the regulation of social media from the perspective of the United States, focusing on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It examines the significant role social media plays in free speech and democratic discourse, particularly during widespread movements and elections. The study delves into the legal challenges of regulating social media content, emphasizing Section 230 while analyzing issues related to protecting free speech and achieving consistent content moderation both in the United States and globally. It proposes an “interpretational shift” in judicial approaches to Section 230 cases and addresses the risks of amending the section. Additionally, the chapter suggests that any amendments to the “safe harbor” provision should include clear standards to safeguard free speech online.
Evidence suggests that the conception of “mental health,” as well as Western health care models, needs to be reimagined to better reflect the unique care needs of Black people. Within these systems, Black people are more likely to experience secondary victimization and retraumatization. Despite these systemic failings, Black people often find ways to manage self-care, wellness, and healing. Within the context of dueling pandemics (COVID-19 and racial injustice), Black people turned to social media applications to develop community-led, culturally-congruent care models. This study aims to explore the ways Black people experienced virtual engagements on social media during the dueling pandemics. This exploratory study employed a six-phase thematic analysis approach, while utilizing publicly available textual data (Instagram comments) from two key social media engagements targeting Black audiences. Prominent themes gleaned from this analysis elucidate the healing and therapeutic value of these virtual gatherings. These include: (1) Expression of Gratitude and Appreciation, (2) Necessity, (3) Timeliness, (4) Accessibility, (5) Emotional and Spiritual Impact of the Virtual Space, (6) Ancestral and Culturally-Grounded Healing Practices, (7) Reprieve within the Virtual Space, and (8) Community and Collectivism. Our analysis reveals that when elaborating on their experience participating in two key social media engagements targeting Black audiences, attendees’ responses reflect key aspects of empirically-grounded, culturally-congruent care models for Black people (i.e., radical healing). We contend our findings demonstrate the unique ways social media applications might be more intentionally leveraged to create culturally-congruent care for Black people.
Through a linguistic anthropological lens of interdiscursivity, this article analyzes the semiotic and historical development of the testimonio genre of #Cuéntalo (“tell it [your story]”), a 2018 Twitter movement that began in Spain to protest sexual violence and evolved when the hashtag traveled to Argentina. The recognition of #Cuéntalo tweets as a genre helped to put the narratives on the public record by offering a paradigmatic frame that invited participation and poetic variation, producing a sense of performance of witnessing and memory‐making. I argue that this endeavor was ultimately a successful intervention due to the following factors: the infrastructure and participation frameworks of social media, the historical precedent of women's and feminist movements in the region, the genre's allowance for first‐person storytelling by other narrators, and the subsequent archival efforts and media recontextualizations. The large quantity of tweets—iterations of a similar story—demonstrated the truth and severity of the issue, as each tweet was simultaneously narrated by the victim, the tweet's author, and society as a whole. In the case of #Cuéntalo testimonios, the individual and the aggregate came together via hashtag activism in a collective witnessing of social injustice that was archived as subaltern social memory.
This ethnographic examination of a binary linguistic hierarchy in Haiti shares the critical terrain of Viranjini Munasinghe's unpacking of Caribbean creolization theory. It is a grounded inquiry into a problematic of ontology that inheres in techniques of making non‐white identities deployed by Caribbean privileged people of color at arm's length from a European colonial heritage that underpins their privileged class positions. Borrowing Munasinghe's analytic concept of theory made schizophrenic by ideology, the investigation reveals Haiti's francophone minority ideologically utilizing Haitian Creole as a black‐nationalist symbol in its domination of the monolingual Creole‐speaking majority. The ideological move devalues Creole while elevating French in the reproduction of class inequality. The linguistic schizophrenia undermines the theoretical nation‐building logic of Creole as national language. Failing practical validation of Creole in all spheres of Haitian life, I conclude, claims on the state and civil society by Haiti's vast monolingual Creole‐speaking majority cannot logically be validated.
This article examines the impact of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement on decolonization efforts in Australia, focusing on non-Indigenous Australians’ attitudes towards the Voice to Parliament (VtP). This study utilized surveys (122 respondents) and interviews (11) with predominantly non-Indigenous Australians, conducted before the October 2023 VtP referendum. We found that the BLM movement did not bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Instead, the research highlights a highly polarized environment, particularly evident in the discourse surrounding the VtP referendum. Factors such as the lack of truth-telling regarding Australia's colonial history, media bias, community segregation and political polarization created a complex association between BLM and stances on the VtP. A promising result is that individuals who recognized the link between BLM and challenges faced by Indigenous Australians were more likely to support the VtP. The overall findings indicate that Australia has a way to go towards true reconciliation.
This paper examines the relation of affordance and enregisterment in the socialization of users through the popular 4chan phrase “kek.” This word, overwhelmingly used as an equivalent for “lol” (netspeak for “laugh out loud”), has taken up several other meanings within “/pol/,” the politically incorrect subforum on 4chan, an anonymous imageboard forum. Drawing from both enregisterment and affordance theory, I claim that the processes of mobilizing kek in very community‐specific ways allow for users within this digital media space to not only enregister what a /pol/ user should “sound like,” but that it creates an environment which socializes a very specific kind of user itself. These branching paths of kek explored in this article situate kek as first, an affective assessment marker within interactive speech; then, as a lamination of the word, and deification of chaos magic and mischief celebrated on 4chan, represented by the frog‐headed Egyptian god Kek; and finally, as a sovereign nation, known as “Kekistan.” Through these examples, I argue that a “creature of kek” is a socially constructed, enregistered framework of “knowing,” by which users on /pol/ legitimize themselves to new users, and in broader digital spaces.
Taking Bosnia-Herzegovina as a case study, this article examines how memory activists, acting at the meso-level, use digital media to implement various counter-memory strategies in relation to the war of 1992–1995. A variety of practices at the margins of official historical discourses, which are still dominated by victimization and hatred, are examined and examples from both the literature and original empirical data are used to show how, in an extremely tense political climate, memory activists can use diverse strategies and tools to allow new representations of the past to circulate, bringing about mnemonic change. I suggest that memory activists in BiH, although operating in a public sphere governed by ethnonationalist divisions and political parallelism, use digital media as an arena, space, or repository for counter-memory narratives. Supported by thematic analysis, this interdisciplinary research paper responds to a need for contemporary empirical research on media memory activism and opens new perspectives for future interdisciplinary studies of these issues in other divided societies.
The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: 'media epidemiography'. This composite of the terms 'epidemiology' and 'ethnography' is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today's swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain's indignados movement, with Twitter as the central site of propagation. Protesters have used Twitter and other viral platforms to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the protests, spreading slogans and organizational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement. These developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is shaped by viral contents 'shared' by media professionals and amateurs - an age of viral reality.
This essay foregrounds how technocultural assemblages - software platforms, algorithms, digital networks and affects - are constitutive of online racialized identities. Rather than being concerned with what online identities are in terms of ethno-racial representation and signification, we can explore how they are materialized via the technologies of online platforms. The essay focuses on the micro-blogging site of Twitter and the viral phenomenon of racialized hashtags - dubbed as 'Blacktags' - for example #onlyintheghetto or #ifsantawasblack. The circulation of these racialized hashtags is analyzed as the transmission of contagious meanings and affects, such as anti/racist humour, sentiment and social commentary. Blacktags as contagious digital objects play a role in constituting the 'Black Twitter' identities they articulate and interact with. Beyond conceiving Black Twitter as a group of preconstituted users tweeting racialized hashtags, Blacktags are instrumental in producing networked subjects which have the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online. Thus, ethno-racial collective behaviours on the Twitter social media platform are grasped as emergent aggregations, materialized through the contagious social relations produced by the networked propagation of Blacktags.
Must the Internet promote political fragmentation? Although this is a possible outcome of personalized online news, we argue that other futures are possible and that thoughtful design could promote more socially desirable behavior. Research has shown that individuals crave opinion reinforcement more than they avoid exposure to diverse viewpoints and that, in many situations, hearing the other side is desirable. We suggest that, equipped with this knowledge, software designers ought to create tools that encourage and facilitate consumption of diverse news streams, making users, and society, better off. We propose several techniques to help achieve this goal. One approach focuses on making useful or intriguing opinion-challenges more accessible. The other centers on nudging people toward diversity by creating environments that accentuate its benefits. Advancing research in this area is critical in the face of increasingly partisan news media, and we believe these strategies can help.
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article, we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.
In this paper we describe how Twitter is used in various languages. We observe notable differences between languages regarding the use of hashtags, links, mentions, and conversations. We propose two dimensions that can be used to classify languages, each of which is likely to require different ways of analysis.
Elizabeth Freeman: To begin with, I'd like to ask how and why the rubric of temporality (however you understand that) became important to your thinking as a queer theorist. What scholarly, activist, personal, political, or other concerns motivated the turn toward time for you? What does this turn seem to open up conceptually, institutionally, politically, or otherwise? Does it threaten to limit or shut down particular kinds of analysis or possibilities for social change?
Carolyn Dinshaw: Working primarily on a period in the distant past—the Middle Ages—I have been concerned since day one of graduate school with the relationship of past to present. "Obsessed" is more like it, really: I felt caught between the scholarly imperative, especially keen at Princeton, to view the past as other and my sense that present concerns could usefully illuminate the past for us now. My dissertation was basically an agon played out between these two positions; by the time of my first book I had developed a moderate historicist view of the past that allowed for connections with the present via discursive traditions like gender. But I had also stowed away, not just as scholarly resource but also as token of affirmation and desire, Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which I—a lesbian graduate student in that desert of normativity, Princeton—had bought as soon as it came out.
Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Duke University Press, 1999), was my attempt to deal directly with such desire—a queer desire for history. I was again trying to negotiate between alteritists (social constructionists) and those who appealed to transhistorical constants of some sort (essentialists), but this time in my analyses I found that even Foucault, the inspiration of social constructionists, connected affectively with the past. I focused on the possibility of touching across time, collapsing time through affective contact between marginalized people now and then, and I suggested that with such queer historical touches we could form communities across time.
This refusal of linear historicism has freed me to think further about multiple temporalities in the present. Postcolonial historians have been most influential in this process, and the turn toward temporality has been thrilling: it opens the way for other modes of consciousness to be considered seriously—those of ghosts, for example, and mystics. But the condition of heterogeneous temporalities can be exploited for destruction as well as expansion: Ernst Bloch recounts chillingly the Nazis' deployment of temporal asynchrony in recruiting Germans who felt backward in the face of an alien modernity. So we must take seriously temporality's tremendous social and political force.
Christopher Nealon: My book is Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke University Press, 2001). I came to graduate school at Cornell in the early 1990s, the moment of the rise of queer theory in the academy. I'd been working as a reporter at Gay Community News, in Boston, where I'd been writing about what turned out to be the heyday of ACT UP's activism; this kept in my mind the idea that the "subjecthood" of social movements was at least as interesting as the vicissitudes of the individual, not least because of the ways that social movements could generate very mobile and responsive kinds of collectivity to meet assault and crisis.
Later, working in the human sexuality library at Cornell, I became interested in the ways that lesbian and...
This article details the networked production and dissemination of news on Twitter during snapshots of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions as seen through information flows—sets of near-duplicate tweets—across activists, bloggers, journalists, mainstream media outlets, and other engaged participants. We differentiate between these user types and analyze patterns of sourcing and routing information among them. We describe the symbiotic relationship between media outlets and individuals and the distinct roles particular user types appear to play. Using this analysis, we discuss how Twitter plays a key role in amplifying and spreading timely information across the globe.
This study examines how mainstream journalists who microblog negotiate their professional norms and practices in a new media format that directly challenges them. Through a content analysis of more than 22,000 of their tweets (postings) on the microblog platform Twitter, this study reveals that the journalists more freely express opinions, a common microblogging practice but one which contests the journalistic norm of objectivity (impartiality and nonpartisanship). To a lesser extent, the journalists also adopted two other norm-related microblogging features: providing accountability and transparency regarding how they conduct their work, and sharing user-generated content with their followers. The journalists working for national newspapers, national television news divisions, and cable news networks were less inclined in their tweets than their counterparts working for less “elite” news outlets, to relinquish their gatekeeping role by sharing their stage with other news gatherers and commentators, or to provide accountability and transparency by providing information about their jobs, engaging in discussions with other tweeters, writing about their personal lives, or linking to external websites.
Bakhtin proposed that novelistic ''chronotopes'' (depictions of place-time-and-personhood) implicitly frame readers' acts of construing a novel's plot and explicit content in ways that potentially transform everyday chronotopes presupposed by readers. Generalizing from the case of novels (and other genres of written discourse), this article develops an account of ''cultural chronotopes,'' namely depictions of place-time-and-personhood to which social interactants orient when they engage each other through discursive signs of any kind. Particular attention is given to a chronotope termed ''mass mediated spacetime'' and to a feature of subjectivity (the formation of ''recombinant selves'') characteristic of the mass-mediated public sphere. The chronotopic phenomena explored in the seven accompanying articles (this issue) are discussed in the light of these proposals.
The scene is the lounge of the Washington Hilton, site of the Professional Social Scientists annual convention. A few people are drinking at the bar. In the center of the room three tables have been pushed together. Tankards of beer dot the tables and a number of people recline in the vinyl covered chairs. The men are mostly bearded individuals of middle age; four of them are puffing on well-worn pipes. Three younger women, cigarette packages on the table, smoke as they listen to the oldest of the men... "Hell, I don't know why they're making such a big deal about getting consent to do fieldwork. Why, when I was among the Itsitutsi nobody could give consent in any case--they were barely out of the Stone Age..." Mary smiles indulgently. "But Jim" she says, "You're behind the times. The question is not whether anybody could give you permission to observe and ask questions, but your ethical responsibility to consider your informants' position." At this Peter leans forward. His face is serious as he says very slowly, "You're both at extremes. Informed consent is something required by funding agencies. Why, if I had to get consent from or inform the persons I observe in my urban drug study, I'd be lost. I disguise myself and my small cassette recorder and try to play the role of a drug user." Jim motions to a waiter to bring them another round.
What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly filter the information they receive? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions in 2001'sRepublic.com. Now, inRepublic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Weblogs have emerged as a significant political force.Republic.com 2.0highlights new research on how people are using the Internet, especially the blogosphere. Sunstein warns against "information cocoons" and "echo chambers," wherein people avoid the news and opinions that they don't want to hear. He also demonstrates the need to regulate the innumerable choices made possible by technology. His proposed remedies and reforms emphasize what consumers and producers can do to help avoid the perils, and realize the promise, of the Internet.
Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of the internet as an ethnographic site by suggesting how concepts of routine, movement and sociality enable us to understand the making of social media ethnography knowledge and places.
Social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring. A spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground. Social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders.No one could have predicted that Mohammed Bouazizi would play a role in unleashing a wave of protest for democracy in the Arab world. Yet, after the young vegetable merchant stepped in front of a municipal building in Tunisia and set himself on fire in protest of the government on December 17, 2010, democratic fervor spread across North Africa and the Middle East.Governments in Tunisia and Egypt soon fell, civil war broke out in Libya, and protestors took to the streets in Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The Arab Spring had many causes. One of these sources was social media and its power to put a human face on political oppression. Bouazizi’s self-immolation was one of several stories told and retold on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in ways that inspired dissidents to organize protests, criticize their governments, and spread ideas about democracy. Until now, most of what we have known about the role of social media in the Arab Spring has been anecdotal.Focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt, this research included creating a unique database of information collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The research also included creating maps of important Egyptian political websites, examining political conversations in the Tunisian blogosphere, analyzing more than 3 million Tweets based on keywords used, and tracking which countries thousands of individuals tweeted from during the revolutions. The result is that for the first time we have evidence confirming social media’s critical role in the Arab Spring.
Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?
According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.
Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.
This article explores the use of the Black American cultural tradition of “signifyin’” as a means of performing racial identity online. In the United States, race is deeply tied to corporeal signifiers. But, in social media, the body can be obscured or even imitated (e.g., by a deceptive avatar). Without reliable corporeal signifiers of racial difference readily apparent, Black users often perform their identities through displays of cultural competence and knowledge. The linguistic practice of “signifyin’,” which deploys figurative language, indirectness, doubleness, and wordplay as a means of conveying multiple layers of meaning, serves as a powerful resource for the performance of Black cultural identity on Twitter.
The recent rise of digital activism' has promoted a questioning of the existing relationships between state, markets, civil society and citizen action by developing new and networked ways of thinking. The network society has become the default context within which these acts of digital activism are located and understood. This contribution proposes that the newness in Activisms 2010+' is the imperative that the digital technologies put upon these events should be rendered intelligible, legible and accessible within the digital paradigm. There is a demand that local events, contextual histories and material practices should be made understandable and accountable to the global rhetoric of spectacle' that neglects, overrides and makes invisible acts that do not have the possibility of a spectacle. Through a case study of the Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala' in China, this article hopes to illustrate the need for a new conceptual framework and vocabulary to account for the new conditions of citizen action and the potentials for political change and intervention therein. It further suggests that the discourse around digital activism stop focusing on the new in terms of processes, spectacles and objects, and instead look at the new in conditions that make citizen action possible.
This contribution offers a view on social struggles as epistemic struggles to critically engage with the Activism 2010+ debate. Our core idea is that social struggles that stand up against depoliticization, economic exploitation and cultural alienation cannot be adequately understood through the same rationality that underlies the processes that they are breaking with. We invite a reading of social struggles as open questions to the dominant ways of thinking and ordering of the real. Our way of doing this is by developing a view of the Zapatistas uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Battle of Seattle, USA, as political events that have challenged the epistemic hegemony of modernity, its instrumental rationality and its chronological temporality. In so doing, we establish a relation between the political ideas of Hanna Arendt and those of decolonial thought, as a means to connect traditions of critique that belong to different genealogies (Western critical thought and Latin American decolonial thought) and which correspond to different conceptions of modernity and social justice. Bringing together these different traditions of critique is a key analytical step to move beyond one-sided universalisms into forms of argumentation that are built on the possibility of dialogue across a plurality of epistemic locations. This is a modest move in the much-needed search for epistemic justice.
This essay proposes a model for analyzing the militarization of the US–Mexico border and, more specifically, the death toll that it has elicited. It counters existing critiques of border militarization that imply that the border death toll is a result of a scheme for labor exploitation associated with late global capitalism. This essay argues that while entrapment and exploitation account for the economic exploitability of Latin American immigrants and of Latinos writ large, the border death toll is more a reflection of the role that race has played in structuring modern nation states like the United States. The death toll, moreover, is largely the result of how Latinidad has been produced as an ethno-racial signifier of peril within the socio-logics of US sovereignty. To account for this condition, this essay introduces the term racial state of expendability.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to engage in a systematic analysis of academic research that relies on the collection and use of Twitter data, creating topology of Twitter research that details the disciplines and methods of analysis, amount of tweets and users under analysis, the methods used to collect Twitter data, and accounts of ethical considerations related to these projects.
Design/methodology/approach
– Content analysis of 382 academic publications from 2006 to 2012 that used Twitter as their primary platform for data collection and analysis.
Findings
– The analysis of over 380 scholarly publications utilizing Twitter data reveals noteworthy trends related to the growth of Twitter-based research overall, the disciplines engaged in such research, the methods of acquiring Twitter data for analysis, and emerging ethical considerations of such research.
Research limitations/implications
– The findings provide a benchmark analysis that must be updated with the continued growth of Twitter-based research.
Originality/value
– The research is the first full-text systematic analysis of Twitter-based research projects, focussing on the growth in discipline and methods as well as its ethical implications. It is of value for the broader research community currently engaged in social media-based research, and will prompt reflexive evaluation of what research is occurring, how it is occurring, what is being done with Twitter data, and how researchers are addressing the ethics of Twitter-based research.
This article explores the links between social media and public space within the #Occupy Everywhere movements. Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s–2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements—one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase. [social movements, globalization, political protest, public space, social media, new technologies, inequality]
In this essay, I discuss how linguistic anthropological scholarship in 2013 has been increasingly confronted by the concepts of superdiversity, new media, and big data. As the super-new-big purports to identify a contemporary moment in which we are witnessing unprecedented change, I interrogate the degree to which these concepts rely on assumptions about reality as natural state versus ideological production. I consider how the super-new-big invites us to scrutinize various reconceptualizations of diversity (is it super?), media (is it new?), and data (is it big?), leaving us to inevitably contemplate each concept's implicitly invoked opposite: regular diversity, old media, and small data. In the section on diversity, I explore linguistic anthropological scholarship that examines how notions of difference continue to be entangled in projects of the nation-state, the market economy, and social inequality. In the sections on media and data, I consider how questions about what constitutes linguistic anthropological data and methodology are being raised and addressed by research that analyzes new and old technologies, ethnographic material, semiotic forms, scale, and ontology. I conclude by questioning the extent to which it is the super-new-big itself or the contemplation about the super-new-big that produces perceived change in the world.
Public Culture 14.1 (2002) 49-90
This essay has a public. If you are reading (or hearing) this, you are part of its public. So first let me say: Welcome. Of course, you might stop reading (or leave the room), and someone else might start (or enter). Would the public of this essay therefore be different? Would it ever be possible to know anything about the public to which, I hope, you still belong?
What is a public? It is a curiously obscure question, considering that few things have been more important in the development of modernity. Publics have become an essential fact of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are. Several senses of the noun public tend to be intermixed in usage. People do not always distinguish between the public and a public, although in some contexts this difference can matter a great deal.
The public is a kind of social totality. Its most common sense is that of the people in general. It might be the people organized as the nation, the commonwealth, the city, the state, or some other community. It might be very general, as in Christendom or humanity. But in each case the public, as a people, is thought to include everyone within the field in question. This sense of totality is brought out in speaking of the public, even though to speak of a national public implies that others exist; there must be as many publics as polities, but whenever one is addressed as the public, the others are assumed not to matter.
A public can also be a second thing: a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space. A performer on stage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is. A crowd at a sports event, a concert, or a riot might be a bit blurrier around the edges, but still knows itself by knowing where and when it is assembled in common visibility and common action.
I will return to both of these senses, but what I mainly want to clarify in this essay is a third sense of public: the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation -- like the public of this essay. (Nice to have you with us, still.) The distinctions among these three senses are not always sharp and are not simply the difference between oral and written contexts. When an essay is read aloud as a lecture at a university, for example, the concrete audience of hearers understands itself as standing in for a more indefinite audience of readers. And often, when a form of discourse is not addressing an institutional or subcultural audience, such as members of a profession, its audience can understand itself not just as a public but as the public. In such cases, different senses of audience and circulation are in play at once. Examples like this suggest that it is worth understanding the distinctions better, if only because the transpositions among them can have important social effects.
The idea of a public, as distinct from both the public and any bounded audience, has become part of the common repertoire of modern culture. Everyone intuitively understands how it works. On reflection, however, its rules can seem rather odd. I would like to bring some of our intuitive understanding into the open in order to speculate about the history of the form and the role it plays in constructing our social world.
1. A public is self-organized.
A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed.
A kind of chicken-and-egg circularity confronts us in the idea of a public. Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how...
The publication of this volume was assisted in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency whose mission is to award grants to support education, scholarship, me-dia programming, libraries, and museums in order to bring the results of cultural activities to the general public. Preparation was made possible in part by a grant from the Translations Program of the endowment.
As an outsider, I would feel very uncomfortable if I were to advocate to a speech community that it ought to try to keep its language alive. It is entirely up to the community or to individuals within a community as to whether they want to put in the effort to develop new speakers for their language. Community members have the right to advocate within their community for the survival of their language; someone from outside the community does not. The right to language choice includes the right to choose against a language. This is the logical result of believing that maintaining an indigenous language is a matter of human rights, a belief virtually all language advocates must share. The outside expert’s role is to assist in providing the means for language survival or revival to motivated community members and perhaps to provide encouragement and a sense of hope that it can be done. (Leanne Hinton, 2002:151–52)
Samples of speech suitable for sociolinguistic analysis may be sought in several ways. Interviews (either formal or informal), and tape-recorded group sessions, are the methods most used currently. In research on a specific variable, the historical present tense (HP), none of these methods proved neutral or adequate. Although the historical present tense is very widely used in conversational narratives, its occurrence within interviews is so infrequent as to be striking. An explanation was found in the way in which the interview has a specific known place as a speech event in the culture of those whose speech was being studied. The so-called spontaneous interview does not have such a place, and for that very reason is even less satisfactory a source of data. The notion of natural speech is taken as properly equivalent to that of appropriate speech; as not equivalent to unselfconscious speech; and as observable easily, and often best, by simple techniques of participation. (Sociolinguistic methodology; speech events, interviews, observation, natural speech; United States English).
This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.
Any discursive event of communication can invoke (index) one or more other events in the nontrivial sense that focal aspects of the ongoing entextualization presuppose that the indexing and indexed lie within some chronotope of "-eval"ness. Varied processes in distinct institutional sites in the macrosociological communicative economy shed light on the contingent varieties of such interdiscursivity. Token-sourced interdiscursivity implies a reconstruction of a specific, historically contingent communicative event as an entextualization/contextualization structure, complete in all its essentials as drawn upon. Type-sourced interdiscursivity implies normativities of form and function, such as rhetorical norms, genres, et cetera. Token-targeted and type-targeted interdiscursivities concern the characteristics of the indexing discursive event(s) as contingent happenings or normativities.
This article addresses the relationship between discourse, textual and social order, and power by means of an examination of the concept of genre. It begins with a critical review of the way genre has been used in linguistic anthropology. A distinction is delineated between approaches that take for granted the status of genre as a tool for classifying and ordering discourse and those that contend with elements of generic ambiguity and dynamism. Proceeding to outline a new approach to genre, the discussion analyzes a wide range of intertextual relations that are deployed in constituting generic links. A series of examples contrasts strategies for minimizing gaps between texts and generic precedents with strategies for maximizing such gaps. A final section points to the ways that investigating generic intertextuality can illuminate questions of ideology, political economy, and power.
While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientistsâ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
Análisis antropológico sobre Second Life, uno de los más grandes mundos virtuales, en el que millones de personas conviven cotidianamente a través de Internet, caracterizados como personajes de tercera dimensión (3D) llamados avatares. El antropólogo Tom Boellstorff formó parte durante dos años de este mundo virtual como el avatar "Tom Bukowski" y exploró, con las herramientas empleadas tradicionalmente en la antropología, una amplia gama de dimensiones y fenómenos sociales de esta realidad paralela, tales como el género y la sexualidad, la raza, el conflicto y la conducta antisocial, la construcción de los vectores del espacio y el tiempo y la interacción del individuo con los grupos.
Biomedical ethics require that research subjects be aware that the drugs they take or procedures they undergo are designed to fulfill the conditions of the experiment and not to benefit a subject's health. This apparently straightforward distinction between research and treatment is a source of much controversy and misunderstanding. Ethicists have labeled this problem the "therapeutic misconception." This misconception and, more broadly, informed consent have been studied extensively. Nonetheless, the therapeutic misconception persists among research subjects. This paper argues that one factor overlooked in the persistence of the therapeutic misconception is the effect of the theoretical paradigm that guides the practice and analysis of informed consent. The paradigm poses an idealized model of communication that ignores social context. This paper examines informed consent practices associated with a cancer research trial to demonstrate an alternative approach to studying informed consent to research. Through analysis of informed consent session transcripts, it demonstrates the importance of taking account of not only what is said, but how and by whom it is said.
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans
- Mikhail Bakhtin