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The thing-power of the Facebook assemblage: Why do users stay on the platform?
Abstract
Facebook is the most used social media platform globally, despite frequent and highly publicised criticism of some of its practices. In this article, we bring together perspectives from vital materialism scholarship – and particularly Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘thing-power’ – with our empirical research on Australian Facebook users to identify what they find important and valuable about the platform. Findings are presented in the form of seven case studies of Facebook use, identifying lively affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break. We argue that this theoretical perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of the distributed and relational agencies generated with and through Facebook assemblages that motivate people to stay on this social media platform.
... Exploring these concerns in social science research, Lupton and Southerton (2021) have spoken about the importance of understanding social media as being located within the broader context of people's everyday lives. They suggest that the experience of Facebook (and by extension all social media platforms) is not 'monolithic' but rather: ...
... In light of this, there is a need to better understand how young queer people are using social media platforms in the context of their lives more broadly, so we can better support their wellbeing. The 'material conditions' that Lupton and Southerton (2021) refer to for this report is in part the changing context of COVID-19. ...
The following reports on one of the largest qualitative studies of sexuality and
gender diverse young people and their use of social media platforms in Australia.
This study had two broad aims: firstly, to better understand the ways sexuality and
gender diverse young people are engaging with social media platforms, and secondly,
using a rapid prototyping methodological design, to reimagine with LGBTQIA+ young
people the ways platforms can respond to their needs. This included exploring how
platforms can better support queer young people’s experiences through design
features, policy, moderation, and organisational measures.
... Para gerar efeitos de rede (interações entre usuários e feedbacks positivos), as plataformas dispõem de diferentes mecanismos. Entre esses mecanismos estão as variadas possibilidades visuais (visual affordances) das redes sociais, que permitem a produção e compartilhamento de mídias pelos usuários retendo sua participação (Lupton & Southerton, 2021;Shane-Simpson et al., 2018) e a possibilidade de os usuários emitirem suas opiniões, compartilharem informações, imagens e avaliações sobre locais, websites, estabelecimentos comerciais e serviços públicos (Hou & Ma, 2022;Kim & Kim, 2020;Siering, 2021;). Assim, a produção de conteúdo de mídia por meio de OCRs se tornaram importantes ativos para os proprietários das plataformas, e seus usuários OCRs, sejam eles consumidores ou organizações produtoras de bens e prestadoras de serviço (Agnihotri & Bhattacharya, 2016;Shi & Chen, 2021;Siering & Janze, 2019). ...
Objetivo: identificar e analisar a percepção e o comportamento dos usuários-consumidores a respeito das avaliações online em uma plataforma digital de food delivery.Marco teórico: apresenta-se a perspectiva das Revisões Online dos Consumidores (OCR) que permitem ao usuário-consumidor tecer comentários qualitativos e quantitativos nas plataformas digitais de food delivery, bem como os aspectos que influenciam a percepção dos consumidores sobre esse tipo de atividade.Método: foi desenvolvida uma pesquisa de caráter misto (quali-quanti), que contou com a análise das estatísticas descritivas e análise de conteúdo de uma Survey com 598 respostas de usuários de uma plataforma de food delivery brasileira. Resultados: Os resultados revelaram três fatores sobre o fenômeno estudado: a percepção da importância; a percepção da confiabilidade das OCRs; e acontecimento de eventos positivos ou negativos durante o processo de atendimento.Conclusão: O artigo contribui para os estudos sobre OCRs, especialmente em relação a eventos e não apenas no esforço como um todo ou aspectos exclusivamente positivos ou negativos. Além disso, ao analisar as percepções e motivações dos usuários da plataforma para responderem OCRs, observou-se que essa atividade é afetada pelo nível de confiabilidade percebida.
... As one of the most compelling online communication tools, Facebook has played a major role in disseminating an array of social, cultural, and political messages, resulting in a wide range of revised perceptions and belief systems (Lupton & Southerton, 2021). Founded in 2004, Facebook started as an online social networking site through which people create new social relationships or simply strengthen existing ones. ...
The growing use and popularity of Facebook have transformed users into prosumers, blending the roles of both consumers and producers after historically being perceived as passive recipients of media texts. Facebook groups, in particular, offer people the opportunity to make the most of their digital footprint as they are involved in shared interest communities where they are more encouraged to share personal content and respond to other members' posts. This study strives to particularly explore, describe, analyze, and interpret the way Facebook groups can contribute to the deconstruction of gender stereotypes within the Moroccan context. For this purpose, we used netno-graphy to delve deeper into the way members of two popular Moroccan Fa-cebook groups, MTC and LA SUPERBE, use their online voices to tackle gender stereotypes. The findings illustrate that although many members of both genders tend to foster gender roles primarily through the use of gen-dered and sexist comments, others react actively against them, demonstrating their intent to make shared online platforms a space for women's empower-ment and gender activism. Further findings reveal that women are more likely than men to redouble their efforts toward deconstructing gender stereotypes which appear to be harming women more than men.
... Recently, Lupton and Southerton (2021) discussed the importance of understanding social media within the broader context of people's everyday lives. They suggest that the use of social media is not 'monolithic' but rather, "we have sought to demonstrate that Facebook is many things, generating diverse forms of thing-power. ...
This paper focuses on the effects of gender diversity – in terms of binary- and third-gender – on social media engagement (SMEn). Specifically, we examine the extent to which SMEn's antecedents and outcomes vary between binary- and third-gender people. Based on the uses and gratification theory (UGT), we develop and validate a model using two cross-sectional studies. Data have been collected from heterosexual and third-gender people (TGP) separately, and analysed with the structural equation modelling (SEM) technique. Our results show that the incentives and outcomes of SMEn are not identical across different gender groups; rather, socially excluded TGP take advantage of social media differently than their heterosexual counterpart. More specifically, habit is the strongest predictor of SMEn for the heterosexual group, which is emotional reassurance for the TGP. Interestingly, identity management is an important determinant of SMEn only for TGP, while social interaction is important for both groups. We further find that SMEn enhances both groups' quality of life and social self-esteem but more for TGP. This study advances knowledge by applying UGT in a new research setting within information systems. The findings provide guidelines to social media architects and policymakers on engaging socially disadvantaged people with social media and enhancing their social wellbeing.
... In our analysis of the interview materials, we adopted a post-qualitative interpretive approach (Schadler, 2019) involving 'thinking with theory' (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Elsewhere we have used the interviews to present a set of case studies that demonstrate the lively forces, relations and agencies that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break (Lupton and Southerton, 2021). For the purposes of this chapter, also drawing on vital materialism concepts, we read through the transcripts looking for moments at which affective forces and relational connections were articulated by the participants when they described their practices and imaginaries concerning Facebook privacy, identifying points of ease or familiarity as well as discomfort or tension. ...
... Studies on the social dimensions of digital technology use have identified the situated dynamics, complexities and nuances of how users may be supported or harmed when they use digital spaces. A range of scholarship on social media users' practices across Facebook (Farci et al. 2017, Lupton & Southerton 2021, Tumblr (Gonzalez-Polledo 2016, Seko & Lewis, 2016) and messaging apps (Hjorth & Lupton, 2021) has demonstrated that social media content can be experienced as intimate affective and relational resources. This is often particularly the case for young users of these platforms (Robards & Lincoln, 2020), including those who experience the world as members of marginalized communities or social groups (Hanckel et al., 2019). ...
... In our analysis of the interview materials, we adopted a post-qualitative interpretive approach (Schadler, 2019) involving 'thinking with theory' (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Elsewhere we have used the interviews to present a set of case studies that demonstrate the lively forces, relations and agencies that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break (Lupton and Southerton, 2021). For the purposes of this chapter, also drawing on vital materialism concepts, we read through the transcripts looking for moments at which affective forces and relational connections were articulated by the participants when they described their practices and imaginaries concerning Facebook privacy, identifying points of ease or familiarity as well as discomfort or tension. ...
... In Australia, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, with many people staying on the platform due to the relational connections it offers through everyday encounters with Facebook friends and groups (Lupton & Southerton, 2021 see also Dynel & Chovanec, 2021;Sinkeviciute, 2019). Humor can offer disenfranchised groups resources to critique authorities, to cope with painful experiences and to create solidarity with peers (Sandberg & Tutenges, 2019;Williams, 2020). ...
From the turn of the century, social attitudes have shifted away from secrecy and anonymity in donor conception in line with broader recognition that children have a right to accurate information about their identity and family. As such, some donor-conceived people are now growing up in families who disclose and discuss donor conception openly while others are unexpectedly learning of their donor-conceived status later in life. Yet, little empirical research has explored the array of actors, processes and technologies that shape experiences of belonging for donor-conceived people. This thesis reports on exploratory research of Australian donor-conceived adults’ experiences. The project adopted an innovative interdisciplinary approach, combining methods and analytic techniques from sociology, social semiotics and media studies to explore everyday social, linguistic and digital practices. Data comprise Hansard from a public hearing of a Senate Committee Inquiry into donor conception; a national online survey with sperm donor-conceived (n=90) and egg donor-conceived (n=1) respondents over 16 years of age; and semi-structured interviews with sperm donor-conceived adults (N=28). The research is also underpinned by vignettes of personal experience to reflexively foreground my own positionality as a donor-conceived person. Findings reveal the significant role that digital technologies play in donor-conceived people’s everyday lives. Donor-conceived peers used digital platforms to exchange experiential knowledge and negotiate meanings ascribed to their collective identity, to educate (prospective) recipient parents and the general public about their perspectives, to trace family members through direct-to-consumer DNA testing, and to strategise for increased recognition in legislation. In terms of family, participants navigated complex and dynamic familial (non) relationships and the lingering consequences of anonymity. However, donor-conceived people also found strategies to help them reckon with secrecy and silence, actively responding to social conditions and challenging the institutions of medicine and the law. Indeed, donor-conceived people drew on experiential and institutional knowledges to position themselves as an authority on donor conception as people with lived expertise. I argue that belonging, for donor-conceived people, is experienced across three planes: in relation to peers, family and the State. In doing so, this thesis underscores how everyday belonging is relational and processual, and achieved through a range of momentous events, everyday encounters and humorous artefacts.
... In the context of 'deep mediatization' (Hepp, 2020) permeating our social spaces, more and more aspects of our livesincluding how we frame and manage risksare seamlessly adapted to digital media logic and infrastructures. But even if users maintain their agentic capacities (Lupton, 2020;Lupton and Sutherton, 2021), their ability to act is both enabled and constrained by (technological and regulatory) social media affordances (e.g., Gibson, 1977;Hutchby, 2001;Bloomfield et al., 2010). By shaping conditions of possibility, and hence overcoming the limitations of technological determinism (Fussey and Roth, 2020), social media affordances leave space for human (individual or collective) choice or intervention. ...
Sharenting – that is, the sharing of identifying and sensitive information of minors, who are often overexposed online by parents or guardians – has, at times, criminogenic potential, as the information shared can enable both heinous crimes and other types of harmful conducts. While most research on sharenting has focused on the sharenters and their agency, there is a gap in addressing whether and to what extent social media platforms display criminogenic features that can render sharenting risky for affected minors. By relying on a adapted crime proofing of legislation approach, our contribution analyses the self-regulations (in the form of corporate documents and forms of self-organisation) of five major social media platforms, and identifies several risks and vulnerabilities to harmful sharenting practices embedded in the platforms’ policies. In doing so, the study demonstrates how criminological imagination can effectively contribute to the multidisciplinary debates on digital ecosystems and their regulation, paving the way for a reduction of criminogenic and harm-enabling opportunities online.
... In our analysis of the interview materials, we adopted a post-qualitative interpretive approach (Schadler, 2019) involving 'thinking with theory' (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Elsewhere we have used the interviews to present a set of case studies that demonstrate the lively forces, relations and agencies that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break (Lupton and Southerton, 2021). For the purposes of this chapter, also drawing on vital materialism concepts, we read through the transcripts looking for moments at which affective forces and relational connections were articulated by the participants when they described their practices and imaginaries concerning Facebook privacy, identifying points of ease or familiarity as well as discomfort or tension. ...
This chapter offers highly original perspectives on social media use from a new materialism perspective. Based on interview data, it reconsiders the role of agency in social media participation in order to challenge increasingly popular complaints about social media as purely manipulative or exploitative. As social media platforms such as Facebook have transitioned from being new and novel to an established and everyday part of social life, the chapter unpacks the emerging social dynamics of social media with an eye towards the future. Techno-dystopian visions of new digital technologies can be characterized as a broader affective atmosphere experienced by countries of the Global North. The chapter explores counter imaginaries that have been expressed in both the popular media and the academic literature ever since the widespread distribution and adoption of digital technologies in everyday life from the 1980s onwards.
... In Australia, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, with many people staying on the platform due to the relational connections it offers through everyday encounters with Facebook friends and groups (Lupton & Southerton, 2021). Of the array of Facebook groups accessed by the approximately 1.8 billion Facebook users (Facebook, 2021), meme groups represent a small but important subset. ...
Memes are a key feature of participatory digital cultures and have been found to play an important role in collective identity formation. Limited scholarship has explored the role of memes within closed communities, where perceived privacy and trust may impact the ways users demarcate the in-group (us) and out-group (them) through humor. This article draws on analysis of semi-structured interviews with Australian donor-conceived people (people conceived with donor sperm or eggs) and a collection of memes they shared. We take an interdisciplinary approach to analysis, combining reflexive thematic analysis informed by interpretive traditions within sociology with an analysis that applies the iconization framework from social semiotics. Our findings explore how donor-conceived people view memes as: texts that “only we get,” that are “light and fun” and that provide “a way to deal with emotions.” We conceptualize memes as bonding icons: semiotic artifacts which foreground shared feelings and invite alignment around a collective identity. More broadly, we argue that “getting” a meme requires alignment with the values construed, a process which reinforces ties to the community. In doing so, we explore how everyday social and linguistic practices contribute to individuals’ sense of belonging.
... In our analysis of the interview materials, we adopted a post-qualitative interpretive approach (Schadler, 2019) involving 'thinking with theory' (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Elsewhere we have used the interviews to present a set of case studies that demonstrate the lively forces, relations and agencies that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break (Lupton and Southerton, 2021). For the purposes of this chapter, also drawing on vital materialism concepts, we read through the transcripts looking for moments at which affective forces and relational connections were articulated by the participants when they described their practices and imaginaries concerning Facebook privacy, identifying points of ease or familiarity as well as discomfort or tension. ...
Introduction
Ever since the widespread distribution and adoption of digital technologies in everyday life from the 1980s onwards, two counter imaginaries have been expressed in both the popular media and the academic literature. The first imaginary deals with the techno- utopian dimensions of novel digital technologies: that is, the almost magical benefits they can supposedly offer human lives in terms of promoting social networks and communication, improving health and productivity, solving mundane problems and removing the tedium of low-skilled work. The second imaginary is directly opposed in its dystopian directions, positioning digital technologies as manipulating people, knowing ‘too much about them’, profiting from their personal data without their knowledge or consent, taking away their jobs, de-humanizing personal relationships, de-skilling children and young people and so on. Both imaginaries are simplistic, techno-determinist and hyperbolic, yet they continue to receive widespread attention and promotion (Wajcman, 2017).
Techno-dystopian visions of new digital technologies can be characterized as a broader affective atmosphere (Anderson, 2009) experienced by countries of the Global North, in which the future is increasingly imagined as disastrous, with little hope for redemption (Urry, 2016; Tutton, 2017). Sociologists of the future have identified the seemingly intractable pessimism that pervades future-oriented imaginaries. Tutton (2017) characterizes this approach as outlining ‘wicked futures’, replete with imaginaries of social problems that are difficult to solve. For Urry (2016, p. 33), the dystopian portrayal of novel technologies and other trends such as environmental pollution and climate change is born of what he describes as ‘new catastrophic futures’: a pessimistic sentiment about the future that began to emerge in the early 2000s.
This timeline is evident in the altered visions of digital technologies. Devices and software that in the late 20th century seemed to hold much promise for contributing to human flourishing, by the turn of the century had begun to feel tarnished, their potential for democratic expression, activism and civil society overtaken by what Zuboff (2019) describes as ‘surveillance capitalism’. Surveillance capitalism refers to the commodification of the digitized information about people that is generated when they go online and use mobile devices and apps. Zuboff's influential book on this subject is replete with generalizing and hyperbolic statements about the manipulation and exploitation of internet users by the major tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook.
... In Australia, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, with many people staying on the platform due to the relational connections it offers through everyday encounters with Facebook friends and groups (Lupton & Southerton, 2021). Of the array of Facebook groups accessed by the approximately 1.8 billion Facebook users (Facebook, 2021), meme groups represent a small but important subset. ...
... In our analysis of the interview materials, we adopted a post-qualitative interpretive approach (Schadler, 2019) involving 'thinking with theory' (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Elsewhere we have used the interviews to present a set of case studies that demonstrate the lively forces, relations and agencies that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break (Lupton and Southerton, 2021). For the purposes of this chapter, also drawing on vital materialism concepts, we read through the transcripts looking for moments at which affective forces and relational connections were articulated by the participants when they described their practices and imaginaries concerning Facebook privacy, identifying points of ease or familiarity as well as discomfort or tension. ...
Over the past few years, the public image of the hugely successful social media platform and internet empire Facebook has been significantly undermined by high levels of negative publicity worldwide, concerning alleged user-privacy incursions such as the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook is often portrayed in popular and academic discourses as motivated by nefarious intentions, evoking dark imaginaries of the future exploitation and emotional manipulation of users of 'wicked Facebook'. Yet the platform remains as popular as ever: a central part of everyday digital social life in many countries. In this chapter, we discuss findings from our interview study involving Australian Facebook users conducted post-Cambridge Analytica. In analysing these interviews, we develop a more-than-human perspective on Facebook privacy that draws particularly on vital materialism approaches. This is an approach that recognises the distributed and relational agencies involved when people come together with other users and the affordances of the Facebook platform. We position the 'Facebook privacy assemblage' as a dynamic and lively gathering of humans and nonhuman agents. In the face of media reports of Facebook's use of personal data and academic scholarship that tends to emphasise the negative aspects of the platform's exploitation of users' information, we argue a vital materialism perspective can offer detailed insights into the micropolitical dimensions of Facebook use. The relational and distributed nature of agential capacities related to Facebook privacy were evident in our findings. Concepts of Facebook privacy were continually negotiated and assessed as people observed others' practices, as well as the operations of the automated targeted advertising generated by the platform's software. These findings suggest that popular representations of platforms like Facebook as entirely separate entities from the communities that use them-and often as in opposition to users as manipulative agents-needs to be reconsidered if we are to better understand the dynamic and lively dimensions of the relational connections and affective forces that generate agencies.
Sharenting is widely practised and has attracted significant media and academic attention. While the motives for sharenting are well researched, other aspects are less well understood. This chapter explores sharenting from a criminological perspective. It focuses on the criminogenic features and implications of sharenting practices, particularly the risks of cybersecurity and digital harms. We argue that it is important to move away from a focus on the sharenters who are constructed as scapegoats in the media and instead acknowledge that parents and guardians who share child-centric content are embedded in socio-technical contexts. It is crucial to pay more attention to the social media platforms on which sharenting is taking place and how they are regulated. The chapter starts out with assessing the media representation of risks associated with sharenting from a criminological perspective. Subsequently, we turn to an overview over the types of crimes and social harms that are enabled by sharenting. We then discuss the affordances (According to Hutchby (Sociology, 35:441–456, 2001) affordances enable and constrain actions.) of social medial platforms and their regulations. Finally, we conclude the chapter with suggestions for the mitigation of risks caused by sharenting and further research needs.
This chapter begins with a historical account of the emergence of digital technologies in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand), and the critical role they are playing for sexuality and gender diverse young people. As transnational digital technologies are employed by health services and used by young people to make sense of their experiences and ongoing stigma and discrimination, this book interrogates the design of these digital wellbeing technologies. The chapter surveys the existing literature, examining how emerging technologies are used by sexuality and gender diverse young people, and their experiences with them. The chapter outlines the focus of the book, which aims to extend literature on transnational digital practices, and better understand the development, design and construction of ‘transnational digital wellbeing initiatives’ in LGBT+ lives. The chapter also introduces the framework underpinning this study—the capability approach, and how it provides a tool to make sense of wellbeing and, when used in conversation with social theories, provides a critical framework for making sense of the (im)possibilities of technological design.
Sharenting – the digital sharing of sensitive information of minors by parents or guardians – has not yet been investigated from a criminological perspective. However, there are reported concerns regarding its criminogenic potential amidst fast-growing media interest in sharenting practices, particularly in relation to the perceived crime risks. This article offers an exploratory analysis of cases where such practices led to the victimisation of minors, evidencing the gap between media reports about crime risks and actual victimisation. The paper also demonstrates that sharenting is a more complex phenomenon than generally recognised. By exploring these issues, the paper advances criminological understanding of the practice and demonstrates the divergences between media-reported crime risks and victimisation associated with sharenting. Although the paper highlights media exaggerations of such crime victimisation which can heighten public fear and anxiety, the article also provides new insights on the nature of actual victimisation, to raise awareness and aid preventative intervention.
Social media practices are situated within the contexts that people are located in, including family and peer relationships. LGBTQIA+ young people carefully curate social media spaces to find similar others in careful ways. However, less is understood about how existing connections to families of origin (re)shape social media practices. Drawing on interview and focus group data with 65 LGBTQIA+ young people, we examine family considerations in social media practices and curation strategies. Findings reveal that considerations about familial relations play an important role in how young people use social media for maintaining and fostering ties with family members. Young LGBTQIA+ people narrativise their social media practices as intensely affective experiences, where issues of care, concern, and love for family, (re)shapes their social media use. We argue that queer young people’s social media practices can be conceptualised as family practices and consider the implications this has for making sense of social media for queer young people.
This article explores the affective dimensions of social media platform TikTok, and its potential as a novel form of political participation among young people. It draws on data from a sample of 24 TikToks focused on the 2019/20 Australian bushfires, as well as seven interviews with young people who create, view and share TikToks. Building on Ash’s notion of ‘affective design’, the article demonstrates how the memetic qualities of juxtaposition, whimsy and humour are utilised to enable escape and/or connection. As young people grappled with the intensity of emotions from the Australian bushfires, TikTok gave them space for the expression of complex affects through humour, whimsy, and juxtaposition.
Patient advocates and activists are increasingly relying on online health information that can assist them to manage their health condition. Yet once online, they will confront diverse information whose veracity and utility are difficult to determine. This article offers a sociological analysis of the practical methods, or heuristics, that patient advocates and activists use when making judgements about the credibility and utility of online information. Drawing on the findings from interviews with fifty Australian patient advocates and activists, it is argued that these individuals' use of these heuristics reflects their hopes that information can help them manage their condition which may, in some cases, override fears and uncertainties that arise during searches. The article identifies the common ‘rules-of-thumb’—or what we call the ‘heuristics of hope’—that patient advocates/activists may use to make judgements and highlights the dangers of over-reliance on them, especially regarding clinically unproven, potentially unsafe treatments. Analyses of the heuristics of hope, we conclude, can assist in understanding the dynamics of decision-making and the role that affect plays in online patient communities which is crucial in an age characterised by the rapid circulation of emotionally charged messages, often based on hope.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and other non-heterosexual and gender diverse (LGBTIQ+) young people utilise a range of digital media platforms to explore identity, find support and manage boundaries. Less well understood, however, is how they navigate risk and rewards across the different social media platforms that are part of their everyday lives. In this study, we draw on the concept of affordances, as well as recent work on curation, to examine 23 in-depth interviews with LGBTIQ+ young people about their uses of social media. Our findings show how the affordances of platforms used by LGBTIQ+ young people, and the contexts of their engagement, situate and inform a typology of uses. These practices – focused on finding, building and fostering support – draw on young people’s social media literacies, where their affective experiences range from feelings of safety, security and control, to fear, disappointment and anger. These practices also work to manage boundaries between what is ‘for them’ (family, work colleagues, friends) and ‘not for them’. This work allowed our participants to mitigate risk, and circumnavigate normative platform policies and norms, contributing to queer-world building beyond the self. In doing so, we argue that young people’s social media curation strategies contribute to their health and well-being.
The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical framework for studying digital resignation, the condition produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so. We build on the growing body of research that identifies feelings of futility regarding companies’ respect for consumer privacy by suggesting a link between these feelings and the activities of the companies they benefit. We conceptualize digital resignation as a rational response to consumer surveillance. We further argue that routine corporate practices encourage this sense of helplessness. Illuminating the dynamics of this sociopolitical phenomenon creates a template for addressing important questions about the forces that shape uneven power relationships between companies and publics in the digital age.
Abstract
Both new materialist philosophy of science and Indigenous studies scholarship have developed theories about the
agency of non-human things. There has, however, been relatively little articulation between these two literatures in the
qualitative social sciences. This essay looks at the possible reasons for this lack of engagement–including the relatively
recent emergence of new materialism, pervasive racism within the academy, and foundational differences in the priorities
and philosophical assumptions informing these two literatures. Addressing new materialist scholars, the essay inventories
the ethical, political, and intellectual reasons social scientists using Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism should also be
reading and citing Indigenous studies literature on agent ontologies. It makes the case that the Indigenous studies literature
on agent ontologies have strengths in precisely some of the places new materialist social science is facing challenges.
Examples are provided and the broader political implications of such work are examined.
Hundreds of thousands of apps are now available that have been designed to monitor, manage or improve users’ health. In this article, I draw on feminist new materialist perspectives, and particularly the vital materialism offered by Jane Bennett, to consider the affordances, relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities that contribute to the thing-power of the human-app health assemblage. The discussion is underpinned by the assumption that digital technologies such as health apps are part of a more-than-human world, in which they generate forces and capacities only with and through their associations and relations with the humans who create and use them—or in some cases, relinquish or resist their use. To demonstrate how this approach can be applied to the analysis of empirical material, I discuss the findings of several of my recent projects involving people talking about their use of health apps. Drawing on these materials, I show that the vibrancy of the thing-power of the human-app assemblage is a complex admixture of affective forces, personal biographies and life trajectories, human and nonhuman affordances and cultural imaginaries. All of these elements contribute to a greater or lesser degree to the agential capacities generated by this assemblage.
Since its beginning in 2004, Facebook has come to serve as a digital record of life for many. Profiles have become personal archives, documenting significant relationships, work lives, education, leisure, and loss. Like reading old journals and going through photo albums, the act of ‘scrolling back’ through a Facebook profile can be nostalgic, challenging, and embarrassing, all at once. In this chapter, Robards, Lincoln, Pinkard, and Harris report on findings from qualitative research to examine the ways in which remembering happens through Facebook. By scrolling back with their participants on Facebook the authors explain how Facebook has become an archive of intimate memories and is central to many people’s practices of remembering.
As one of the largest social media platforms, the meaning and role of Facebook is widely contested, where many argue that Facebook’s cultural importance especially for younger generations, is declining. Popular thinking and common assumptions often position Facebook as a boring platform taken up by older generations. Yet, despite these claims, Facebook’s user base continues to grow and it is still one of the most dominant global platforms in today’s media ecology. This article provides insight into this apparent contradiction through longitudinal research conducted with young adults, aged 18 to 30 in 2013, and aged 24 to 34 in 2017. Informed by research on youth and young adults, this article returns to domestication theory to understand how personal economies of meaning are shaped over time through changing patterns of use, in relation to an ever-evolving Facebook platform. Although respondents share contradictory accounts of their understandings of Facebook, they also share commonalities. Notably, respondents shift from a highly emotive framing of Facebook marked by “compulsive connection” in 2013 to a routinized use of Facebook for performing personal and often mundane services such as scheduling, micro coordinating, archiving, and to some extent, relationship maintenance. We argue that this shift illustrates the domestication of Facebook from a wild social space to a “personal service platform,” thus providing an important insight into Facebook’s continued user growth and cultural dominance.
What are the parameters that define a posthuman knowing subject, her scientific credibility and ethical accountability? Taking the posthumanities as an emergent field of enquiry based on the convergence of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism, I argue that posthuman knowledge claims go beyond the critiques of the universalist image of ‘Man’ and of human exceptionalism. The conceptual foundation I envisage for the critical posthumanities is a neo-Spinozist monistic ontology that assumes radical immanence, i.e. the primacy of intelligent and self-organizing matter. This implies that the posthuman knowing subject has to be understood as a relational embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity and not only as a transcendental consciousness. Two related notions emerge from this claim: firstly, the mind-body continuum – i.e. the embrainment of the body and embodiment of the mind – and secondly, the nature-culture continuum – i.e. ‘naturecultural’ and ‘humanimal’ transversal bonding. The article explores these key conceptual and methodological perspectives and discusses the implications of the critical posthumanities for practices in the contemporary ‘research’ university.
Though mainstream sociological theory has been founded within dualisms such as structure/agency, nature/culture, and mind/matter, a thread within sociology dating back to Spencer and Tarde (Karakayali, 2015) favoured a monist ontology that cut across such dualistic categories. This thread has been reinvigorated by recent developments in social theory, including the new materialisms, posthumanism and affect theories. Here we assess what a monist or ‘flat’ ontology means for sociological understanding of key concepts such as structures and systems, power and resistance. We examine two monistic sociologies: Bruno Latour’s ‘sociology of associations’ and DeLanda’s ontology of assemblages. Understandings of social processes in terms of structures, systems or mechanisms are replaced with a focus upon the micropolitics of events and interactions. Power is a flux of forces or ‘affects’ fully immanent within events, while resistance is similarly an affective flow in events producing micropolitical effects contrary to power or control.
As a concept, affordance is integral to scholarly analysis across multiple fields—including media studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, ecological psychology, and design studies among others. Critics, however, rightly point to the following shortcomings: definitional confusion, a false binary in which artifacts either afford or do not, and failure to account for diverse subject-artifact relations. Addressing these critiques, this article demarcates the mechanisms of affordance—as artifacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse—which take shape through interrelated conditions: perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy. Together, the mechanisms and conditions constitute a dynamic and structurally situated model that addresses how artifacts afford, for whom and under what circumstances.
Now in operation for 12 years, Facebook comes to serve as a digital record of life for young people. With significant parts of their lives played out on the site, users are able to turn to these profiles to reflect on how their use of Facebook has come to constitute a life narrative. In this paper, we report on findings from qualitative research into sustained use of Facebook by young people in their twenties in Australia and the UK. We focus on the ‘editing’ or re-ordering of narratives that our participants engage in while they scroll back through their years of disclosures – and the disclosures of others – that make up their Facebook Timelines. We present our analysis through three arenas (employment, family life and romantic relationships) subject to what we argue is a reflexive re-ordering of life narratives. We argue that Facebook profiles represent visual manifestations of Giddens [1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press] reflexive project of the self, that serve not only to communicate a sense of self to others, but that also act as texts of personal reflection and of growing up, subject to ongoing revision.
This essay proposes a genealogical cartography of the emergence of a posthuman turn in critical theory, including feminist theory, based on the convergence of posthumanism with post-anthropocentrism. The former critiques the universalist posture of the idea of ‘Man’ as the alleged ‘measure of all things’. The latter criticizes species hierarchy and the assumption of human exceptionalism. It then explores the implications of the posthuman turn for political subjectivity, notably in terms of the relation between human and nonhuman agents. The essay then critiques the current tendency to create new negative or reactive re-compositions of a new pan-humanity based on vulnerability and fear. The case is made instead for critical posthuman thought and a definition of the subject as nomadic, that is to say: transversal, relational, affective, embedded and embodied.
Background
Many women in countries in the global North access digital media information sources during pregnancy and the early years of motherhood. These include websites, blogs, online discussion forums, apps and social media platforms. Little previous research has sought to investigate in detail how women use the diverse range of digital media now available to them and what types of information they value. A qualitative study using focus groups was conducted to address these issues.
Methods
Four focus groups were held in Sydney, Australia, including a total of 36 women who were either pregnant or had given birth in the previous three years. The participants were asked to talk about the types of digital media they used for pregnancy and parenting purposes, why they used them and in what ways they found them useful or helpful (or not). Group discussions were transcribed and thematically analysed, identifying the dominant information characteristics identified by women as valuable and useful.
Results
Nine characteristics emerged from the focus group discussions as most important to women: information that was: 1) immediate; 2) regular; 3) detailed; 4) entertaining; 5) customised; 6) practical; 7) professional; 8) reassuring; and 9) unbiased. These characteristics were valued for different purposes and needs. Digital media provided women with details when they most needed them or at times when they had opportunities to access them. The study showed that women value apps or digital platforms that are multi-functional. The findings revealed the importance of using digital information for establishing and maintaining social connections and intimate relationships with other mothers. However, participants also highly valued expert advice and expressed the desire for greater and more ready access to information and support offered by healthcare professionals.
Conclusions
Pregnant women and those with young children place a high value on the information and support they receive from and sharing using online sources and apps. They are accustomed to ready and immediate access to information using digital technologies and want better access to that offered by professionals. Recognising and finding ways to meet these needs should be included in planning healthcare provision and support for this group. Further research with women from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and non-urban locations is required to identify whether they have different information needs and values from the women who were included in the study reported here.
There is no question that anthropogenic processes have had planetary effects, in inter/intraaction with other processes and species, for as long as our species can be identified (a few tens of thousand years); and agriculture has been huge (a few thousand years). Of course, from the start the greatest planetary terraformers (and reformers) of all have been and still are bacteria and their kin, also in inter/intra-action of myriad kinds (including with people and their practices, technological and otherwise). 1 The spread of seed-dispersing plants millions of years before human agriculture was a planet-changing development, and so were many other revolutionary evolutionary ecological developmental historical events. People joined the bumptious fray early and dynamically, even before they/we were critters who were later named Homo sapiens. But I think the issues about naming relevant to the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity. The constant question when considering systemic phenomena has to be, when do changes in degree become changes in kind, and what are the effects of bioculturally, biotechnically, biopolitically, historically situated people (not Man) relative to, and combined with, the effects of other species assemblages and other biotic/abiotic forces? No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too. But, is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the “game” of life on earth for everybody and everything? It's more than climate change; it's also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people and other critters, etc, etc, in systemically linked patterns that threaten major system collapse after major system collapse after major system collapse. Recursion can be a drag. Anna Tsing in a recent paper called “Feral Biologies” suggests that the inflection point between the Holocene and the Anthropocene might be the wiping out of most of the refugia from which diverse species assemblages (with or without people) can be reconstituted after major events (like desertification, or clear cutting, or, or, …). 2 This is kin to the World-Ecology
This article, which introduces this special issue on new empiricisms and new materialisms, focuses on two of the many conditions that enable this new work: first, an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being to refuse the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thought and, second, a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation in the becoming of existence. The article includes a brief description of how matter matters differently in this new work, of Deleuze and Guattari’s description of philosophy as the laying out of a plane that enables new concepts, a discussion of the “new,” and how/if methodology can be thought in the “new.”
It is the purpose of this paper to make explicit the methodology (the theory of the methods) by which we conducted research for an Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project on the relationship of values to value. Specifically, we wanted to study the imperative of Facebook to monetize social relationships, what happens when one of our significant forms of communication is driven by the search for profit, by the logic of capital. We therefore wanted to ‘get inside’ and understand what capital's new lines of flight, informationally driven models of economic expansion, do to social relations. Taking up the challenge to develop methods appropriate to the challenges of ‘big data', we applied four different methods to investigate the interface that is Facebook: we designed custom software tools, generated an online survey, developed data visualizations, and conducted interviews with participants to discuss their understandings of our analysis. We used Lefebvre's [(2004). Rhythmnanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. London: Continuum] rhythmanalysis and Kember and Zylinska's [(2012). Life after new media: Mediation as a vital process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] ideas about ‘lifeness’ to inform our methodology. This paper reports on a research process that was not entirely straightforward. We were thwarted in a variety of ways, especially by challenge to use software to study software and had to develop our project in unanticipated directions, but we also found much more than we initially imagined possible. As so few academic researchers are able to study Facebook through its own tools (as Tufekci [(201457.
Tufekci, Z. (2014). Big questions for social media big data: Representativeness, validity and other methodological pitfalls. In ICWSM ‘14: Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp. 505–514.View all references). Big questions for social media big data: Representativeness, validity and other methodological pitfalls. In ICWSM ‘14: Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 505–514)] notes how, unsurprisingly, at the 2013 ICWSM only about 5% of papers were about Facebook and nearly all of these were co-authored with Facebook data scientists), we hope that our methodology is useful for other researchers seeking to develop less conventional research on Facebook.
At the end of its first decade, Facebook’s identity, popularity and characteristics are shaped in important ways by its becoming a form of mobile media. This article seeks to explore and understand Facebook as the important force in mobile media and communication it now is. It draws upon and combines perspectives from technology production, design and economy, as well as user adoption, consumption, practices, affect, emotion and resistance. This article discusses the beginnings of mobile Facebook and the early adoption of mobile Facebook associated with the rise of smartphones. The second part of the article explores Facebook’s integration with photography (with Instagram) and social games (such as Zynga’s Farmville). This article argues that Facebook’s mobile career is an accomplishment that has distinctively melded evolving affordances, everyday use across a wide range of settings, as well as political economies, corporate strategy and design.
This article explores the new modalities of visibility engendered by new media, with a focus on the social networking site Facebook. Influenced by Foucault’s writings on Panopticism – that is, the architectural structuring of visibility – this article argues for understanding the construction of visibility on Facebook through an architectural framework that pays particular attention to underlying software processes and algorithmic power. Through an analysis of EdgeRank, the algorithm structuring the flow of information and communication on Facebook’s ‘News Feed’, I argue that the regime of visibility constructed imposes a perceived ‘threat of invisibility’ on the part of the participatory subject. As a result, I reverse Foucault’s notion of surveillance as a form of permanent visibility, arguing that participatory subjectivity is not constituted through the imposed threat of an all-seeing vision machine, but by the constant possibility of disappearing and becoming obsolete.
Facebook’s rise to ubiquity over the last decade came to a dramatic halt in March 2018 after a massive data breach, including improper use of consumer data, was revealed, followed by the most significant one-day stock devaluation in recent history. The business model on which Facebook has sustained itself for years had a fatal flaw, and consumers were the ultimate victims — their backlash began swiftly and was categorised online under the #DeleteFacebook hashtag. To assess the impact of said backlash, this paper examines user-generated content (ie tweets) created by consumers in the days immediately following the Cambridge Analytica crisis. This paper will provide insight into the emergent themes surrounding this brand crisis for Facebook and how consumers wish to move forward in their interactions with the platform. The study uses textual analytics to identify topics and extract meanings contained in an unstructured textual dataset composed of Twitter data. Themes surrounding privacy, fear of missing out, helpfulness, and account deactivation emerged from the analysis. Managerial implications for advertisers are presented.
Over the past few years, the public image of the hugely successful social media platform and internet empire Facebook has been significantly undermined by high levels of negative publicity worldwide, concerning alleged user-privacy incursions such as the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook is often portrayed in popular and academic discourses as motivated by nefarious intentions, evoking dark imaginaries of the future exploitation and emotional manipulation of users of 'wicked Facebook'. Yet the platform remains as popular as ever: a central part of everyday digital social life in many countries. In this chapter, we discuss findings from our interview study involving Australian Facebook users conducted post-Cambridge Analytica. In analysing these interviews, we develop a more-than-human perspective on Facebook privacy that draws particularly on vital materialism approaches. This is an approach that recognises the distributed and relational agencies involved when people come together with other users and the affordances of the Facebook platform. We position the 'Facebook privacy assemblage' as a dynamic and lively gathering of humans and nonhuman agents. In the face of media reports of Facebook's use of personal data and academic scholarship that tends to emphasise the negative aspects of the platform's exploitation of users' information, we argue a vital materialism perspective can offer detailed insights into the micropolitical dimensions of Facebook use. The relational and distributed nature of agential capacities related to Facebook privacy were evident in our findings. Concepts of Facebook privacy were continually negotiated and assessed as people observed others' practices, as well as the operations of the automated targeted advertising generated by the platform's software. These findings suggest that popular representations of platforms like Facebook as entirely separate entities from the communities that use them-and often as in opposition to users as manipulative agents-needs to be reconsidered if we are to better understand the dynamic and lively dimensions of the relational connections and affective forces that generate agencies.
This study examines use of digital transferred knowledge within husbandry based on interviews and literature studies. Traditional knowledge is the base of husbandry. In husbandry today, this knowledge is combined with the digitally transferred knowledge through the use of the global positioning system collar. Husbandry never operates in isolation from other actors but interacts and is affected by multiple stakeholders and by regulatory practices regulations. The digital data can, besides being used in everyday practice, also be incorporated in reindeer husbandry plans. Reindeer husbandry plans is a tool for obtaining information of land use in husbandry in communication with other land users, but it is also a tool for operational reindeer management for the communities. The reindeer use of grazing land can through the data from the global positioning system collar create “hard facts” used for aspirations of power in discussions over land use.
This article presents findings from a qualitative study concerning Australian women's use of Facebook for health and medical information and support and the implications for understanding modes of lay knowledge and expertise. Thinking with feminist new materialism theory, we identify the relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities described by participants as technological affordances came together with human bodily affordances. Affective forces were a dominant feature in users’ accounts. Women were able to make relational connections with peers based on how valid or relevant they found other group members’ expertise and experiences, how supportive other members were, how strong they wanted their personal connection to be and how much privacy they wanted to preserve. We identified three modes of engagement: 1) expertise claims based on appropriation and distribution of biomedical knowledge and experience; 2) sharing experiential knowledge without claiming expertise and 3) evaluation and use of knowledge presented by others principally through observing. We conclude that an ‘expert patient’ is someone who is familiar with the rules of engagement on sites such as Facebook and is able to negotiate and understand the affects and levels of disclosure and intimacy that such engagement demands.
The ways in which young people use digital platforms develop with experience, and are guided by changing understandings of what they should – and should not – be doing online. As such, young people continually develop tacit rules and understandings that guide their platform participation. While based on social interactions with peers and other online contacts these rules are also technologically situated through the architecture of the platform. Based on research with Australian teenagers, this paper explores the ways in which Facebook shapes the communicative practices of young people, and how these were experienced and interpreted by them. Using the platform as a framework for the study demonstrates that some aspects of the Facebook architecture were particularly significant in structuring socialities, particularly: notifications and login for establishing habitual digital practices and norms; the prominence of images to (re)present identity; and the use of metrics (i.e. ‘likes’ and ‘friends’) to negotiate identities and relationships. Each of the participants initiated a range of strategies and rules to negotiate the ways in which the technological and the social were experienced through the platform. The paper concludes by considering the dominant values and social relations implicated through Facebook – and how they often reproduce dominant offline values and power relations.
Drawing on empirical data from qualitative interviews, this article explores young adults’ everyday experiences of ‘logging in’ and their accounts of their engagement with social media platforms, in particular Facebook. By doing so, it shows how ‘logging in’ can turn into feelings of being ‘locked in’–both in relation to personal data-mining and expectations of participation. The paper highlights the complex ways in which young adults responded to these feelings and negotiated connection and disconnection on social media platforms by deploying tactics of limitation and suspension. For example, in order to regain control of their time and negotiate their relationships, young adults tactically used Facebook Messenger’s previews to bypass read receipts and temporarily suspend connection. Using de Certeau’s distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’, the article argues that although young adults managed social media platforms on an individual level (by deploying ‘tactics’), their understandings and negotiations of the platforms were significantly shaped by the platforms’ designs and features, by the strategies of the corporations owning and operating them as well as embedded within the asymmetrical relations of power of platform capitalism. © 2019
In digital spaces, there is constant negotiation of what it means to be a digital subject. Oversharing is a process of this negotiation. The notion of oversharing as simply being public with what ought to be private is limiting and neglects the complex social relations and desires being enacted in the process. In this chapter, Kennedy draws on a qualitative analysis of 22 semi-structured interviews with users of social media platforms. Upon examination of the data it becomes clear that oversharing, while certainly a potentially fraught process, may also be framed as productive. Oversharing fosters new opportunities for intimate connections. Oversharing also prompts discussion on how to live digitally, and evidences the negotiation process of social norms in digital spaces.
Despite sociological attempts to critically address an age-based digital divide, older adults (65+) continue to be portrayed in the academic literature and public discourse as a homogeneous group characterised by technophobia, digital illiteracy, and technology non-use. Additionally, the role of socioeconomic factors and personal contexts in later life are often overlooked in studies on technology adoption and use. For example, older adults who are identified as least likely to use technology (frail, care-dependent, low socioeconomic/educational backgrounds) are typically described as a uniform cluster. Yet, research on digital technology use with this group remains scant – so what can we learn from studying technology adoption among them? This article discusses long-term deployment of new communication technologies with such a group of older adults, shedding light on the dynamics of technology adoption and contexts of use/non-use. It is based on a case study approach and a cross-cultural perspective, using Canadian and Australian mixed-methods research from two projects that included interviews, psychometric scales, and field observations. We present cases from these projects and contest the simplistic notion of an age-based digital divide, by drawing on Strong Structuration Theory to explore the interconnection of agency, structure, and context in the sociotechnical process of technology adoption and use/non-use among older adults.
The idea of exploring affective fabrics of digital cultures has been at the back of my mind for several years. My first encounter with the dense and complex conjunction of the social, the affective and the digital was when I was conducting the ethnography of an online community and researching passionate online nationalism, militarism and racism. I was looking at the effects of hatred, contempt and disgust in and out of cyberspace (Kuntsman, 2009). My ethnography followed virtual circulation of racist texts and images, cyberfantasies of rape and torture in the name of national security, or simply day-to-day online interactions in which the violence of racism and nationalism was normalized into the mundane, sprinkled with ‘smileys’ and often dismissed as ‘just a game’. I was aiming to conceptualize the political and psychic effects of those powerful emotions, as they circulated on- and offline. I wanted to grasp the profound effect of online violence on many Internet users (and myself as an ethnographer) by looking at the ways in which feelings and affective states can reverberate in and out of cyberspace, intensified (or muffled) and transformed through digital circulation and repetition. I wanted to find a language that captures the ways in which affect and emotions take shape through movement between contexts, websites, forums, blogs, comments, and computer screens, flooding us with words, and at times, leaving us speechless.
This article reflects the kinds of situations and spaces where people and algorithms meet. In what situations do people become aware of algorithms? How do they experience and make sense of these algorithms, given their often hidden and invisible nature? To what extent does an awareness of algorithms affect people's use of these platforms, if at all? To help answer these questions, this article examines people's personal stories about the Facebook algorithm through tweets and interviews with 25 ordinary users. To understand the spaces where people and algorithms meet, this article develops the notion of the algorithmic imaginary. It is argued that the algorithmic imaginary – ways of thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be and how they function – is not just productive of different moods and sensations but plays a generative role in moulding the Facebook algorithm itself. Examining how algorithms make people feel, then, seems crucial if we want to understand their social power.
The use of information technologies by young people is commonly understood to be a separate, often risky, activity and a distinct form of sociality. Challenging the dominant understanding, this article applies Haraway’s cyborg theory to explore how Facebook-mediated relationships are interconnected with material relationships and daily social life. Young people’s perspectives are privileged through 40 face-to-face interviews in two rural Victorian towns. The cyborg metaphor highlights the fluid melding of various conceptual dualisms altered in the overlap between the virtual environs of Facebook and the material, everyday lives of the young participants, analysed here using the cyborg metaphor. In this sense, Facebook can be best understood as an individualised extension of young people’s broader social lives, part of a larger suite of information technologies, social media and other mediated sociality that is interconnected with materially based, face-to-face interactions.
Jane Bennett is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a founding member of the journal theory & event. Her recent publications include The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001)and “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter”(Political Theory, 2004). She is working on a book that explores the ecological implications of different conceptions of materiality in contemporary political thought.
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
In an age in which social networking sites have become the preferred way of socializing online, the question of how to think about the contours of friendship in and through these mediated spaces becomes all the more important. In contrast to much existing research on online friendship, this article takes on a software-sensitive approach. Through a close reading of various sociotechnical processes in which friendship is activated on Facebook (i.e., registering, making a profile, finding friends, communicating, etc.), this article suggests that friendships online need to be understood as a gathering of heterogeneous elements that include both humans and nonhumans. Moreover, this article attempts to show how the traditional notion of friendship as something created between equals and free of structural constraints does not apply to the realm of social networking sites, where software increasingly assists users in making certain choices about who will and who will not be their friends.
This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of “thing-power.” Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power.
In this introduction to the special section on ‘Assemblage and geography’, we reflect on the different routes and uses through which ‘assemblage’ is being put to work in contemporary geographical scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular definition of assemblage, or to prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reflect on the multiple ways in which assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared orientation to the composition of social-spatial formations.
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That's Not Necessarily for Them
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