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The digital mundane: social media and the military
Abstract
This article draws on empirical data with British military personnel in order to investigate what we call the digital mundane in military life. We argue that social media and smartphone technologies within the military offer a unique environment in which to investigate the ways individuals position themselves within certain axes of institutional and cultural identities. At the same time, the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social media rituals that service personnel employ through their smartphones resonate widely with, for example, youth culture and digital mobile cultures. Together, they suggest complex mediations with social and mobile media that draw on and extend non-military practice into new (and increasingly normative) terrains.
... In discussing the mundanity of certain gendered digital media practices, Maltby and Thornham (2016) note that their findings echo what we know about the mundanity of gendered media practices in the general population. Thus, for example, they note the continued importance of gender to forming any understanding of media practice in the context of soldiers' wives but also of the infrastructures within which such practices take place. ...
... Thus, for example, they note the continued importance of gender to forming any understanding of media practice in the context of soldiers' wives but also of the infrastructures within which such practices take place. Maltby and Thornham (2016) suggest that in their research with military personnel and their families, media content does not matter as much as practice to their participants: 'This serves to remind us that the content of social media should not be elevated above or outside the practices of social media use while also noting that the content was also discussed in mundane and normative terms' (p. 1161). ...
... Mirrlees, above). We agree with Maltby and Thornham (2016) that there is a need to engage with the mundanity of media practices in the lives of soldiers and their families. At the same time, we suggest that this very mundanity provokes questions about the work of the stories told about war and the military, and the role of the family and the wife in solidifying powerful ideas of home front which help to justify ongoing wars. ...
This article explores how the experiences of soldiers’ wives are mediated in the context of militarised popular culture and following two ultimately unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We show how audiences, representation (in two senses) and gender matter in a qualitative research project with soldiers, soldiers’ wives and veterans, which explores their perceptions of contemporary media representations of British soldiering, and their social media use. In the summer of 2014, we interviewed 31 participants in 5 focus groups for a British Academy funded project. Participants were veterans, veteran support groups, family members (all ‘wives’) and those directly involved with the promotion of the armed forces in various media (the Joint Information Activities Group, Media Operations Team). The focus groups explored media representations of contemporary soldiering across a range of media and genres (TV documentaries, reality TV, drama, newspapers) but also social media use – practices of self-representation. In this article, we focus on interview data from the wives’ groups (as they identify themselves) and find four emergent and overlapping themes: ridicule, comfort, danger and silence. We argue that the mediation of soldier’s wives is an area of pronounced contradiction: one that is important in and of itself for what it tells us about the experience of that group of women and equally important for what it tells us about representation, practice and gender and the ways in which these are entwined in digital culture.
... As an example, in an interview with the Norwegian armed forces, Matberg notes how he is being careful about what to post online as "an image with a female colleague can make him lose thousands of followers in no time," seemingly indicating the importance of being "available" to an (heterosexual, female) audience ( Arstad 2019 ). Matberg thus appears to police his sexuality (or sexual image) in ways resembling how women soldiers are expected to police theirs, on social media ( Maltby and Thornham 2016 ) as well as in the barracks ( Eduards 2012 ). This policing is undoubtably shaped by the commodification of data central to the social media economy, where followings, likes, and shares translate into revenues for Matberg as an influencer who lends his face to not only NATO but also private companies (see, e.g., Kennedy 2013 ). ...
... In addition to interactivity, another important affordance of social media in general, and Instagram in particular, is intimacy . Scholars researching official social media platforms of armed forces and/or soldiery self-representations on social media underline the everyday, mundane, ordinary, informal, and intimate character of these interactions ( Kuntsman and Stein 2015 ;Hellman 2016 ;Maltby and Thornham 2016 ;Corner and Parry 2017 ;Strand 2021 ). There are at least two (interlinked) ways in which these practices can be understood as intimate. ...
... First, social media technologies accessed through smartphone applications are material objects that we bring with us, grab for, and engage repeatedly and routinely in our everyday lives, often without reflecting on why. Studying social media usage in the British Army, Maltby and Thornham (2016 ) have showed how UK soldiers are active on social media while exercising, waiting, and resting, constantly searching for WIFI connection and moving around the base for reception, which emphasizes the similarities between the military and civilian everyday. When civilian audiences view, like, or share the story of Lasse Matberg through social media, it most likely does not to seem to them as a large or necessarily deliberate commitment to supporting NATO security policy. ...
In 2018, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) carried out Trident Juncture, its largest military exercise since the Cold War. The event was promoted on social media featuring Lasse Matberg as “the face of NATO.” Matberg is an Instagram influencer, model, and lieutenant in the Royal Norwegian Navy, with an impressive physique and Viking looks. He frequently appears on NATO’s social media accounts and lends his own platform to share activities such as working out with the Secretary-General. Drawing on the notion of “fantasmatic logics”, we study how visual narratives of influencer marketing can contribute to making war preparations appear normal, void of political significance and even desirable. The figure of Lasse Matberg is read in conjunction with international rearmament and increasing geopolitical antagonism bound up with ideas of “traditional masculinity” and “feminization.” We argue that the muscular yet ambiguously “soft” figure of Lasse Matberg projects a symbolic remasculinization of the West, operating through a fantasmatic logic that seemingly reconciles the contradiction between a West, which is imperial and militarily muscular on the one hand and caring, democratic, and progressive on the other. By shedding light on NATO's use of influencer marketing to promote a military exercise, this article contributes novel insights into the ways in which the figure of the NATO soldier and NATO military buildup are produced as appealing, allowing an ambivalent gendered geopolitical imaginary to emerge.
... The U.S. experience should be understood within the broader context of western democracies' experience with the opportunities and challenges related to social media. The British have conducted studies on how their service members use social media in everyday ways and found that digital mundanity -that is, "…embodied, unthought and routine practices" -helps to inform and deflect military institutional identity (Maltby andThornham 2016, 1165). The Swedes have examined blogs in a military-deployed context for use and hegemonic narrative content (Hellman and Wagnsson 2013;Hellman 2015) as well as similar use ) and patterns of content convergence ) among citizens of EU member states. ...
... Online and networked military spaces are being expanded in new and novel ways (Maltby and Thornham 2016). Indeed, it is clear that current and future wars will be fought both on the ground and in cyberspaces (Gray 1997). ...
Most college undergraduates are Millennials or Generation Z members. These generations are ferocious social media consumers across a range of platforms. Research exists on the U.S. military’s adoption of social media, but less is known about the everyday implications of social media use and how service members might differ in their uses from their civilian peers. Using survey data comparing (N = 960) American civilian college students, Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets, and military academy cadets, we examine how these groups use social media, the educational and social impacts of this usage, and experiences with self-censorship and anxiety. We find a civilian-military gap when it comes to social media uses and experiences. Social media is more adverse for civilians than academy cadets in terms of time usage, impact on education, and experiences with the darker dimensions such as cyber-bullying and harassment. Civilians also practice less self-censorship of social media posts than cadets.
... Military personnel like the rest of the world use social media platforms for mundane activities such as the building of cultural identity. It has been noted that the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social media rituals that military personnel employ resonate widely with the youths and digital cultures (Maltby & Thornham, 2016). Social media by its unique features attracts and tempts the military. ...
This study appraises how the Nigerian military used social media platforms to provide a counter narrative and quell the online firestorm regarding the Nigerian Defence Academy's (NDA's) terrorists' attack and how Nigerians reacted to these strategic communication items or lack of items about the attack. The study analysed 8,210 Facebook posts and comments from Defence Headquarters Nigeria and Facebook users in Nigeria. Findings demonstrate that the Nigerian military adopted silence as a strategy and thus, did not effectively utilise social media platforms to provide a counter narrative or information to quell the online firestorm regarding the NDA terrorists' attack. Results further illustrate that Nigerian Facebook users criticised the Federal Government, and the military, and were disgusted that a fortress such as the NDA could be attacked and demanded the firing of the Service Chiefs and NDA leaders for their response and attempted cover-up of the attack. The study concludes that while a high reservoir of trust moderates the short and long-term effects of an online firestorm, inactions during an online firestorm aggravates the effect of such an online crisis.
... Scholars mostly focused on smartphone use by US and Israeli soldiers (Lawson 2014;Rosenberg 2018;Gardner 2019), typically in quieter and more routine environments. A common finding is that the use of social media and mobiles by soldiers in peace, as Maltby and Thornham (2016) found, reflects civilian "digital mundane". However, these studies mostly focus on mobile phone uses on the bases or in peacetime and rarely pinpoint how mobile communication transforms during an actual combat situation-and transforms it. ...
One of the problems in the growing subfield of mediatization of war is evidence on how exactly civilian communication devices become integrated with warfare. In this article, I focus on patterns of use of mobile phones on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with Ukrainian servicemen and women, this article presents a typology for the frontline use of mobiles in the spirit of actor–network theory. The omnipresence of mobiles on the battlefield creates a set of unique participatory media practices. A variety of personal purposes, such as private communication and entertainment, are combined in the same device with wiretapping, fire targeting, minefield mapping and combat communication. Mobiles supplant old or unavailable equipment and fill gaps in military infrastructure, becoming weaponized and contributing to the hybridization of the military and the intimate, and of war and peace. These results imply the role of mobiles as a mediated extension of battlefield and question the very definition of what constitutes weapon as tool of combat.
... Military personnel like the rest of the world use social media platforms for mundane activities such as the building of cultural identity. It has been noted that the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social media rituals that military personnel employ resonate widely with youth and digital cultures (Maltby & Thornham, 2016).Social media by its unique features attract and tempts the military. For example, social media platforms enable people to engage in ways not envisage before, help set agenda and build public opinion, social media platforms helps coordinate collective and connective actions and even used for propaganda guerrilla warfare (Tewari, 2019). ...
Contemporary war and conflict research have often centred on media representation and the relationship between the media and military actors. While this provides insights into the dynamics of contemporary war and conflict, these approaches to mediatised war and conflict fail to engage with how social media enables militaries to communicate directly to their target audience by circumventing legacy media. Consequently, this paper interrogates the military use of social media for national security communication. The discourse creates a research trajectory on Nigeria by investigating the themes from the Nigerian Military social media posts regarding their involvement and progress in the conflicts in Northern Nigeria. Using qualitative content analysis technique, this paper analysed 10,750 posts, comments, and tweets from the Defence Headquarters Nigeria (@DefenceinforNG) Facebook and Twitter pages. Findings showed that social media play a significant role on how the Nigerian Military communicates their involvement and progress in the conflicts in Northern Nigeria. Data further showed that the Nigerian military social media pages are used for deterrence and demoralisation of the insurgents as well as trust building with the Nigerian public. It was, therefore, recommended, among others, that Nigerian military increase their social media use in conflict communication.
... Many countries, including Russai, China, Israel, United Kingdom, United States, India, and Pakistan, have integrated social media platforms into military operations that are being optimally utilized for propaganda purposes (Galeotti, 2015;Hoskins & O'Loughlin, 2015;Maltby & Thornham, 2016;Tanchak, 2017;Till, 2020;Tumber & Webster, 2006). Researchers have also analyzed the online propaganda by terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and Islamic States to promote their cause and get more recruits (Fahmy, 2019;Klausen, 2015;Zeitzoff, 2014). ...
In this study, we analyze the state of information warfare on Twittersphere between India and Pakistan in the wake of Pulwama attack in Kashmir region and the subsequent surgical strikes by Indian forces inside Pakistan. We selected two leading Twitter hashtags on the conflict from the two countries each. A total of 20,000 tweets were manually analyzed. Contrary to the existing scholarship on digital information warfare, we found citizens from both countries produced most of the content. Among the citizens, those Twitter handles that showed affiliations with the heads of governments that we consider as trolls were the leading contributors. Moreover, the study found that contributors from the two countries mainly posted on their own hashtags and did not engage in counter-arguments with the contributors from other country. This resulted in overwhelming support for the two countries in their own assorted hashtags and outright criticism in the hashtags originating from the other country.
... Given such issues with mainstream media coverage, it is not surprising that many in the military have turned to new media technologies to tell their own story. Such service-member-created media has also been studied, and research has considered military blogs and letters (Shapiro & Humphreys, 2013), visual media (Kennedy, 2009;Struk, 2011), video (McSorley, 2012Silvestri, 2013), and the differences between first-person accounts distributed via social media and traditional news coverage (Maltby & Thornham, 2016;Parry & Thuminim, 2017;Silvestri, 2015). ...
Military-related journalism serves an important purpose, and has a special relevance in the modern era of nearly continuous American military involvement. Yet, conflicting goals have long made relations between journalists and the military difficult, and both institutions have faced abundant criticism regarding the role each plays in providing information to the public. This study seeks to provide additional perspective on the topic, and involves a consideration of the views held by individual military service members and veterans regarding military-related news. Data gathered from interviews suggests that, while a diversity of perspectives exist, widespread frustration with military-related reporting is very common among the military population.
... Access to the Internet, however, is not limited to "official" Israeli military outlets. Digital technology itself has become mundane (Maltby & Thornham, 2016, p. 1157, such that nearly every Israeli soldier has a smartphone in his or her pocket and is constantly checking and updating social media platforms. While in uniform, Israeli soldiers regularly share their thoughts and feelings on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. ...
This article explores the social media postings of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers on two different and unofficial Facebook groups. While scholars of armed forces and society have noted the growing importance that militaries have placed on digital media, there is little data regarding the unofficial uses and meanings that regular soldiers themselves make of social networking sites. With an anthropological focus on everyday experiences, we argue that the social media activity of IDF personnel highlights the quotidian aspects of military life in ways that reverberate beyond the strictly ideological or political facets of their service. Here, soldiers can express their frustrations with military bureaucracy, while also presenting a lighthearted (and positive) commentary on a shared rite of passage. This research opens a window into the lives and dilemmas of the first generation of Israeli soldiers to employ new media as a taken for granted aspect of their service.
... Grass-roots breastfeeding support used to be understood and studied as face-to-face support groups based on formal and informal peer support (Dowling 2014, Faircloth 2013, Aiken and Thomson 2013. Over the last ten years, with a growing importance of mediatised sociability and the creation of 'digital mundane' practices of daily interactions and constant connectivity (Maltby andThornham 2016, Wilson andChivers Yochim 2017), a new form of grass-roots mobilisation has emerged. Research observes that connectivity is changing the ways in which women develop competencies in mothering practices, including breastfeeding (Romano 2007;McDaniel et al. 2011, Huberty et al. 2013, Fredriksen et al. 2016, Leune and Nizard 2012, Radkowska-Walkowicz 2009, Zdrojewska-Zywiecka 2012. ...
Online support communities for people with various health problems and related online activist groups have been the focus of scholarly attention for three decades. The arrival of social media increased the popularity and breadth of both phenomena. Breastfeeding online activism represents an interesting case in how it connects the (health) support and activist online presences of breastfeeding women. Furthermore, breastfeeding activism - or lactivism - is a form of embodied activism, often performed through breastfeeding. Stemming from over six years of observant participation in breastfeeding spaces online, this article traces the ways in which lactivists use Facebook to further their cause. From the creation of support groups, through the use of Facebook capabilities to organise action and create structures, to Facebook specific forms of mass action, including image flooding and negrating, I argue that the emergence of lactivism as we know it is intimately connected with, and through, the medium.
... Thornham 2007:125), and, in Chapter 2, I discuss what this means in relation to waste data and dynamic systems. This produces a disciplined body within a metrified and datalogical system (for example, see Lupton 2016; Cheney-Lippold 2011), and it is a political, economic and ideological manoeuvre that constructs the 'disciplinary effects' as a desirous, pleasurable, everyday and mundane (see Gómez Cruz and Thornham 2015;Maltby and Thornham 2016;Moores 2014). ...
Gender and Digital Culture offers a unique contribution to the theoretical and methodological understandings of digital technology as inherently gendered and classed. The silences within, through and from the systems we experience every day, create inequalities that are deeply affective and constitute very real forms of algorithmic vulnerability. The book explores these lived and mundane algorithmic vulnerabilities across three interrelated research projects. These focus on recent digital phenomena including sexting, selfies and wearables, and particular decision-making systems used in health, education and social services. Central to this book are the themes of irreconcilability and the datalogical. It makes the case that feminism and gender politics have become increasingly irreconcilable with not only long-running debates around representation and embodiment, but also with conceptions of the technological, conceptions of the user and of the systems themselves. In keeping with longstanding feminist scholarship, these irreconcilabilities can be productive and generative; they can be used to interrogate the power politics of digital culture. By studying the lived and routine elements of digital technologies, Gender and Digital Culture asks about the many convolutions that are held together through the everyday use of these technologies, and the implications for how gender and technology are approached, discussed and theorised.
... In the UK, 38 million people actively use social media, while in Poland the monthly figure stands at 80% of the 24.9 million Polish Internet users (Gemius 2016;GUS 2017;Statista 2016Statista , 2017. In both countries, women account for 51% of social media users, and for many, access is a daily pattern of living in which 'mundane social media rituals' (Maltby and Thornham 2016) are no longer a space ' apart'. The intensity and routine character of women's online participation create a sense of the ' digital mundane' as a mode of living of particular importance to maternal subjects (Wilson and Chivers Yochim 2017). ...
Based on six years of participant observation in lactivist spaces, this article traces one of the pathways from knowledge sharing to activism and mobilisation in breastfeeding support spaces online, and considers the ways in which lactivist spaces employ biomedical information and various images to create a sense of ‘milk pride’. I want to argue that, although problematic, this is an important aspect of reclaiming biomedical evidence for women’s benefit. By looking at images grouped thematically as ‘wondrous milk’, ‘superpower’, and ‘liquid gold’, the article demonstrates how the appropriation of biomedical discourses occurs at the grassroots level of the breastfeeding movement, understood here as the loosely connected networks of support present in online environments. It then moves to consider how these discourses are deployed to empower women to feel entitled to access specific rights and to extend these to the sphere of work within the household, typically invisible to the wage-work oriented economic sphere.
... In this context, social media like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube are crucial (Seo and Ebrahim 2016). 4 In this paper, we turn our attention to one particular facet that has only begun to receive attention, namely armed forces' activities on digital social media (Crilley 2016;Forte 2014;Jackson 2016;Maltby and Thornham 2016), which are a crucial site of legitimating the military and its activities, particularly so because they de facto 'collapse the gap between the military and the media', which makes them an interesting topic in its own regard (Crilley 2016, 51). Moreover, analysts of military recruiting have also pointed to the importance of paying attention to the production of media by states themselves (Rech 2014). ...
Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. More specifically, it examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the Bundeswehr’s, the German Armed Forces, official channel on Facebook. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the Bundeswehr’s frame of visibility and what remains out of its view.
A response by Laura Shepherd is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2017.1337981
... Much has been written on the sometimes controversial imaging of war from the soldiers' perspective and the paradoxically connective and exclusionary qualities offered through such images and videos (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2009;Kennedy, 2009). In addition to the assorted communicative functions of publicly shared material, the uses of social media within the military and their families have received attention (Silvestri, 2015), with Maltby and Thornham (2016) recently exploring in this journal the social media and digital mobile cultures of service personnel through the concept of the 'digital mundane in military life'. The shift to explore how media technologies intersect with the mundanity of military experience is notable across such scholarship along with the questioning of how such media practices and rituals are implicated in the performance of individual and institutional identities. ...
This editorial provides a brief overview of the wide range of work on media-military relations from different disciplinary areas internationally and indicates a number of prominent themes together with those needing further attention. It locates issues of media technology, form and use within the contexts of the political and public framing of military activities. Before introducing the contributing articles, it notes how different factors of change both inside and outside the institutions of the armed forces are shifting the terms of visibility, legitimacy and accountability.
תקופת הטירונות מהווה ביטוי קיצוני לאופיו של הצבא כ"מוסד כוללני". במהלכה, מצוי החייל בסביבה סטרילית ומבודדת, המנותקת מחיי היומיום ומהמעגלים המשפחתיים והחברתיים באזרחות, במטרה לאפשר את תהליך החִברות הצבאי של הפרט. ניידותו של הטלפון הסלולרי, ממדיו הקטנים והזמינות הגבוהה שהוא מאפשר, מאתגרים את יכולתו של הצבא ליצור את הניתוק הנדרש. באמצעות ראיונות עומק עם חיילים ומפקדים קרביים, מבקש המחקר לבחון את האופן שבו השימוש בסלולרי והגבלותיו מעצבים את המרחב הצבאי בתקופת הטירונות בעיני החיילים ומפקדיהם, ואת מיגוון האתגרים שהנוכחות הסלולרית מציבה בפניהם. ממצאי המחקר מראים, כי הטלפון הנייד משמש לשמירה על קשר יומיומי עם המעגלים החברתיים והמשפחתיים, לתמיכה ברגעי משבר ולצריכת תכני בידור המספקים חוויה אסקפיסטית. בעיני המפקדים, נוכחותו של הסלולרי בידי החיילים נתפסת כפוגעת בחִברות של הטירונים ובטרנספורמציה מפרטים בודדים לקבוצה מגובשת. בנוסף, הסלולרי מאפשר מעורבות מוגברת של הורים, דבר הנתפס בעיני המפקדים כאיום על המבנה ההיררכי הפנים-ארגוני. מזווית אחרת, פוטנציאל הזמינות התמידית בין המפקדים הזוטרים לבכירים נתפס ככזה הפוגע בבניית כושר המנהיגות וקבלת ההחלטות של המפקדים הזוטרים, כחלק מתהליך החִברות-הפיקודית. לאור ממצאים אלה נטען, כי השימוש בסלולרי הוא ביטוי להתנגדות לפרקטיקות השליטה, הפיקוח והקולקטיביזציה אותן מפעיל המוסד הכוללני במטרה להפשיט הטירונים מזהויותיהם הפרטיקולריות, אך בו בעת משמש גם להרחבת הפיקוח ולאישור הסדר ויחסי הכוח המוסדיים
In the article a comparative analysis of the international branding of armed forces is executed. The examples of effective national branding are given. Marketing technologies of defensive branch branding and formation of military culture are explored. Social media as a key instrument in the strategy of branding of defensive branch are considered. The Russian national branding of innovations in defense industry complex is analyzed. The successful Russian national brands in defense field are shown. The way of international collaboration strengthening in dual technologies in chemical and mechanical engineering, material science, nanotechnologies sphere is offered.
Social media is growing as a technological and social phenomenon, with billions of people using it every day around the world. Given its increasing ubiquity, researchers continue to seek to understand social media and its implications for the social world. Part of the growing body of scholarship on social media includes uncovering the most effective methodologies for exploration that appropriately consider differences between the technology of social media and the ways in which people use them. New directions for social media research include the use of big data and analysing the socio-technical nature of social media. Using data from an ongoing study on college Millennials that includes questions about their thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement, the author suggests another direction for future research: studying the implications of social media as an informational source.
The aim of this article is to reflect upon the concept of field when doing ethnographies related to digital technologies of communication in everyday life. Using the example of ethnographic fieldwork carried out by one of the authors with a group of highly mediated photographers in Barcelona, we reflect on the conceptualization of fieldwork in digital ethnographies and discuss how ‘Practice Theory’ could be useful as a basis for media and digital ethnographies.
In February 2010 The UK Home Office released a high-profile report, ‘The Sexualisation of Young People’. The UK report came rather late in the international context, following on from earlier reports, including the American Psychological Association Taskforce report on the sexualization of girls (APA, 2007), and the Australian government-led research on the sexualization of children, which generated widespread debate over ‘corporate paedophilia’ (Rush and La Nauze, 2006).
Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research pro- jects, including on photography practices, young film- makers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary under- standings of selfies either in relation to a ‘‘documenting of the self’’ or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and media phenomenon that understands the selfie as far more than a representational image. This, in turn, necessarily redirects us away from the object ‘‘itself,’’ and in so doing seeks to understand selfies as a socio-technical phenomenon that momentarily and tentatively holds together a number of different elements of mediated digital communication.
What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity. Boyd's conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.
This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens' digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth 'sexting'. We develop a critique of 'postfeminist' media cultures, suggesting teen 'sexting' presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of 'sexy' self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and 'slut shaming' when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens' discussions of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated 'ratings' by possessing and exchanging images of girls' breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called 'slut', 'slag' or 'sket'). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered. © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
Within military culture there is a protected version of masculinity. The theory of symbolic resources (Zittoun, Duveen, Gillespie, Ivinson, & Psaltis, 2003) recognizes that people are positioned within different symbolic streams in the socio-cultural world, in which they can be displaced or can relocate themselves (Benson, 2001; Duveen, 2001). So an individual entering the military is relocating him- or herself from a civilian socio-cultural world to a military one. Twenty-nine semi-structured individual interviews and three focus groups (each comprising two or three individuals) were conducted with male and female British military personnel. Participants included Royal Marine, Army and Royal Air Force personnel and were of a variety of ranks. In accordance with the theory of symbolic resources, the unit of analysis for psychological development is the unit rupture-irruption of certainty-transition. This implies a process that leads to a new form of stability. This is the process which military personnel undertake in order for that which is uncertain and unfamiliar when they begin their training to become certain and familiar. By focusing on the rupture that takes place during the training phase within an individual's military career, one can explore how through symbolic resources, military masculinities develop.
The present article investigates the influences of new media technologies on perception and practices of warfare. Drawing on established conceptual frameworks, such as virtuous war and diffused war, the article argues for the fundamentally ambiguous nature of the Internet and social networking technologies that facilitate democratic participation and political activism, but at the same time enable unprecedented forms of oppression, surveillance and control. The article develops the term iWar to account for the technological affordances that facilitate the latter, and introduces five key dimensions of the concept - individuation, implicitness, interactivity, intimacy and immediacy. These dimensions are then connected to specific socio-technological dynamics, before their impact on practices and perceptions of warfare is sketched out.
The paper examines Facebook’s ambition to extend into the entire web by focusing on social buttons and developing a medium-specific platform critique. It contextualises the rise of buttons and counters as metrics for user engagement and links them to different web economies. Facebook’s Like buttons enable multiple data flows between various actors, contributing to a simultaneous de- and re-centralisation of the web. They allow the instant transformation of user engagement into numbers on button counters, which can be traded and multiplied but also function as tracking devices. The increasing presence of buttons and associated social plugins on the web creates new forms of connectivity between websites, introducing an alternative fabric of the web. Contrary to Facebook’s claim to promote a more social experience of the web, this paper explores the implementation and technical infrastructure of such buttons to conceptualise them as part of a so-called ‘Like economy’.
This article uses dialectical theory to examine how mobile phone use in close friendships affects relational expectations, the experiences of dependence, overdependence, and entrapment, and how those experiences affect relational satisfaction. Results suggest that increased mobile phone use for the purpose of relational maintenance has contradictory consequences for close friendships. Using mobile phones in close relationships increased expectations of relationship maintenance through mobile phones. Increased mobile maintenance expectations positively predicted dependence, which increased satisfaction, and positively predicted overdependence, which decreased satisfaction. Additionally, entrapment, the guilt and pressure to respond to mobile phone contact, uniquely predicted dissatisfaction. The results are interpreted in relation to the interdependent dialectical tensions of friendship, media entrapment, and the logic of perpetual contact.
Official discourse in the United Kingdom and many other OECD countries emphasises education and training as a vehicle for social inclusion and economic growth. Accordingly, those who do not participate are seen to be at risk of long-term exclusion. However, interventions aimed at re-engaging young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) can be ineffective or counter-productive. This article presents findings from the first year of a 3-year ethnography of NEET young people in the north of England and examines the opportunities and barriers experienced by NEET young people as they attempt to negotiate the complex territory following the end of compulsory education. Drawing on Giddens' structuration theory, we discuss young people's actions and the narratives underlying their decisions about post-school education, work and training. The article explores the limitations young people experience and the interplay of agency and structure for those on the margins of education and employment.
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Making offers a series of profound reflections on what it means to create things, on materials and form, the meaning of design, landscape perception, animate life, personal knowledge and the work of the hand. It draws on examples and experiments ranging from prehistoric stone tool-making to the building of medieval cathedrals, from round mounds to monuments, from flying kites to winding string, from drawing to writing. The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art and design, visual studies and material culture.
This article is concerned with a particular aspect of the relationship between media and mobility. The author draws attention to what he calls the “doubly digital” quality of contemporary media—pointing to the intimate connection between movements through media settings (such as online environments) and movements of the fingers or digits on keyboards, keypads, touch-screens, and so on. His main interest is in mobile, generative ways of the hand that is at home with communication technologies, and in opening up an investigation of media uses as manual activities. In exploring these mobile, generative ways, he also reflects on a range of other manual activities that are apparently unrelated to media use—venturing into the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology to discuss phenomenological perspectives on practices of typing, organ and piano playing, and plank sawing. Out of his exploration emerges a focus on embodied, sensuous, practical knowing, and on matters of orientation and habitation (with the author advocating a distinctive nonrepresentational, non-media-centric approach for future studies of media use in everyday life).
Congratulations to Dr. McRobbie! This book has been named to the list of books for the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA).These essays show Angela McRobbie reflecting on a range of issues which have political consequence for women, particularly young women, in a context where it is frequently assumed that progress has been made in the last 30 years, and that with gender issues now 'mainstreamed' in cultural and social life, the moment of feminism per se is now passed. McRobbie trenchantly argues that it is precisely on these grounds that invidious forms of gender -re-stabilisation are able to be re-established. Consumer culture, she argues, encroaches on the terrain of so called female freedom, appears supportive of female success only to tie women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. These nine essays span a wide range of topics, including - the UK government's 'new sexual contract' to young women, - popular TV makeover programmes, - feminist theories of backlash and the 'undoing' of sexual politics, - feminism in a global frame- the 'illegible rage' underlying contemporary femininities.
This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and that mobility is positive and agential – is called into question. Our aim is not only to unpack a number of concepts and assumptions underpinning the mobile phone but also to suggest that these concepts unhelpfully (and even detrimentally) locate mobile phones in relation to the technological possibilities on offer without taking into account what is simultaneously made impossible and immobile, and for whom. Finally, when we set the digital experiences of NEETs alongside the discourses around mobile phones, we find that mobility is restricted – not enabling, and that it is forged in, and articulated as part of an everyday life that is dominated by the social and economic horizons set by the groups status as NEET.
Sexing the Soldier takes a critical look at how gender - what it means to be a man or a woman - is understood within the contemporary British Army, and the political and practical consequences of this. Drawing on original research, this informaive volume looks at: The history and structure of the British Army as a masculine institution. Personnel policies which deal with gender issues. The construction of ideas about military masculinities and femininities within the Army. Media representations of the figure of the soldier. Using case studies ranging from the exclusion of women from direct combat posts, to the issues surrounding bullying, this book argues that we need a fuller, more nuanced assessment of gender issues in the military that moves beyond the simplistic ideas about women's and men's 'natural' capacities for soldiering.
Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new media, interaction, identity, performance, memory and mediation. Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a 'tool' through which we can understand the gendered and socio-culturally constructed phenomenon of our everyday engagement with media. The book is particularly concerned with issues of agency and power, identifying strong correlations between perceptions of gaming and actual gaming practices, as well as the reinforcement, through gaming, of established (gendered, sexed, and classed) power relationships within households. As such, it reveals the manner in which existing relations re-emerge through engagement with new technology. Offering an empirically grounded understanding of what goes on when we mediate technology and media in our everyday lives Ethnographies of the Videogame is more than a timely intervention into game studies. It provides pertinent and reflexive commentary on the relationship between text and audience, highlighting the relationships of gender and power in gaming practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in media and new media, gender and class, and the sociology of leisure.
Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new media, interaction, identity, performance, memory and mediation. Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a ‘tool’ through which we can understand the gendered and socio–culturally constructed phenomenon of our everyday engagement with media. The book is particularly concerned with issues of agency and power, identifying strong correlations between perceptions of gaming and actual gaming practices, as well as the reinforcement, through gaming, of established (gendered, sexed, and classed) power relationships within households. As such, it reveals the manner in which existing relations re-emerge through engagement with new technology. Offering an empirically grounded understanding of what goes on when we mediate technology and media in our everyday lives Ethnographies of the Videogame is more than a timely intervention into game studies. It provides pertinent and reflexive commentary on the relationship between text and audience, highlighting the relationships of gender and power in gaming practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in media and new media, gender and class, and the sociology of leisure.
An argument for a shift in understanding new media--from a fascination with devices to an examination of the complex processes of mediation. © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become "social."
Metadata and data have become a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security--a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication. Datafication is rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims. As part of a larger social media logic, it shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief. Dataism, as this conviction is called, is so successful because masses of people-- naively or unwittingly--trust their personal information to corporate platforms. The notion of trust becomes more problematic because people's faith is extended to other public institutions (e.g. academic research and law enforcement) that handle their (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology makes us want to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.
First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental Phénoménologie de la perception signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers.
Comparing new media to older media can help identify fundamental uses and perceived effects of communication technology. This study analyzes one soldier's milblog (military blog) and one Civil War soldier's letters and diaries to understand how milblogs compare to older forms of soldier correspondence. Despite the overt distinction in technical systems utilized, this analysis demonstrated that the communications through the milblog and letters/diaries share tremendous similarities. In composing their correspondence through these distinct media, each soldier maintained similar anxieties over technological affordances, perceptions of their audience, and motivations for corresponding. Though there were certainly differences in style and content, little that was done or accomplished via the milblog was without direct precedent in the Civil War letters and diaries.
One way to undermine social media monopolies is to refuse to contribute to the communicational economy they are based upon: don't generate exploitable signals, stay quiet-and ask how this might be developed as a common response. Given the naturalized assumption that 'more communication' will automatically produce 'more freedom', suggestions, like this one, that are based on doing less of it might provoke hostility. However, in the case of the social media industries, communication is cultivated not in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of growth; social media wants to capture more of you through your transactions. Moreover, through this process communications are not made 'more free' but tend rather to become less open-certainly in the sense that they are commoditized. With this in mind, this paper asks if a media politics might be generated based on the potentials of silence, on speaking in tongues-and on relying on the resources of metaphorical language rather than on learning to speak or write in ways more amenable to code.2013, Caroline Bassett.
When U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan filter their war experiences through visual aesthetics characteristic of contemporary mobile messaging culture, they produce a new visual discourse for war in the Internet age. A critical reading of 250 Facebook photos reveals an emphasis on colloquial representations of young adult life: hanging out, goofing off, playing games, and wearing costumes. For example, one image depicts two Marines in full desert camouflage posing for a picture while wearing skeleton masks. The Marine on the left looks down at his digital camera, either reviewing a photo or getting ready to hand it off to the “shooter.” The gear in the photo (masks aside) suggests that they are prepared for a combat scenario. Mortars and rockets could hit their base at any moment. The silliness and nonchalance captured in the photo seems antithetical to their physical locale, especially a condition of imminent danger. Most audiences would not recognize this as a combat scenario. Photos like this reflect the ways in which our shifting visual repertoire—with emphases on friendship, domesticity, and spontaneity—modifies visual discourses for contemporary war.
How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.
The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society. This agenda-setting book provides a coherent, interdisciplinary way to engage with everyday activities and environments. Arguing for an innovative, ethnographic approach, it uses detailed examples, based in real world and digital research, to bring its theories to life. The book focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues. By doing so, it convincingly outlines a robust theoretical and methodological approach to understanding contemporary everyday life and activism. A fresh, timely book, this is an excellent resource for students and researchers of everyday life, activism and sustainability across the social sciences
Online social platforms collapse or converge public and private boundaries, creating both opportunities and challenges for pursuing publicity, privacy, and sociality. Presentations of the self thus become networked performances that must convey polysemic content to audiences, actual and imagined, without compromising one’s own sense of self. This study explored how individuals perform the self through the use of Twitter trending hashtags. Content and discourse analyses were used to examine performative strategies and the form of performance in 140 or fewer characters. Findings underscored play as a dominant performative strategy and pointed to the reordering of grammar, syntax, and literary conventions as prevalent ways through which play is performed. Affect, redaction, and deliberative improvisation frame performances that become part of the ongoing storytelling project of the self on Twitter.
Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary "Like" consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Reverse Engineering Social Media also presents ways out of this paradox, illustrating how activists, academics, and users change social media for the better by building alternatives to the dominant social media sites.
This paper examines the relationship between metrics, markets and affect in the contemporary UK academy. It argues that the emergence of a particular structure of feeling amongst academics in the last few years has been closely associated with the growth and development of ‘quantified control’. It examines the functioning of a range of metrics: citations; workload models; transparent costing data; research assessments; teaching quality assessments; and commercial university league tables. It argues that these metrics, and others, although still embedded within an audit culture, increasingly function autonomously as a data assemblage able not just to mimic markets but, increasingly, to enact them. It concludes by posing some questions about the possible implications of this for the future of academic practice.
This chapter focuses on how the intimacy of people with their communication devices results in attitude changes. It discusses the role of mobile phones, e-mail, text messages, and online interaction in modern day life. Communication technology helps people stay connected with one another despite not being physically present in the same place. However, the drawback seems to be that people give priority to people who are online rather than people who are physically present with them. The chapter explores the attachment of people with the Internet, which provides experiences that break the monotony of work, whether professional or personal. It further discusses the use of online role playing games by adolescents, creating different personas for themselves, and making changes that they would like to make in real life.
While open source software development promises a fairer, more democratic model of software production often compared to a gift economy, it also is far more male dominated than other forms of software production. The specific ways F/LOSS instantiates notions of openness in everyday practice exacerbates the exclusion of women. ‘Openness’ is a complex construct that affects more than intellectual property arrangements. It weaves together ideas about authorship, agency, and the circumstances under which knowledge and code can and cannot be exchanged. While open source developers believe technology is orthogonal to the social, notions of openness tie the social to the technical by separating persons from one another and relieving them of obligations that might be created in the course of other forms of gift exchange. In doing so, men monopolize code authorship and simultaneously de-legitimize the kinds of social ties necessary to build mechanisms for women’s inclusion.
As we look over the last decade, the obvious shifts that can be gleaned are the erosions of once distinct categories such as ‘hardcore’ versus ‘casual’ gamer. Instead, we have witnessed an inversion whereby mobile games, once categorized as ‘casual’, became ‘serious’ and now casual again. With the ubiquity of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services along with the transformation of the mobile phone into the multi-mode mobile media, the capacity for mobile location-aware games to teach us new types of experience of place and sketch new cartographies for place has burgeoned. By traversing the online and offline simultaneously through haptic (touch) screens, the possibilities for mobile gaming to teach us new ways of experiencing place upon various levels — that is, not just as a physical geography but technologically, emotionally, psychologically — is endless. In this article I explore the various forms of urban mobile gaming, especially around the experiential and experimental types such as location-based mobile gaming. I focus upon a case study of the Korean mobile game group, Dotplay, in order to flesh out some of the ways in which place reflects, and is inflected by, mobile gaming.
The use of networks as an explanatory framework is widespread in the literature that surrounds technology and information society. The three books reviewed here — The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software by Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker — all make a claim to the novelty that networks provide to their subject matter. By looking closely at the way in which the network is utilized in each of the texts, this review attempts to question the extent to which a network analysis can ground a claim about a discontinuity in technology, society or economics.
This article reviews and examines emerging academic approaches to the study of ‘sexualized culture’; an examination made necessary by contemporary preoccupations with sexual values, practices and identities, the emergence of new forms of sexual experience and the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay. The article maps out some key themes and preoccupations in recent academic writing on sex and sexuality, especially those relating to the contemporary or emerging characteristics of sexual discourse. The key issues of pornographication and democratization, taste formations, postmodern sex and intimacy, and sexual citizenship are explored in detail.