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Young people and TikTok use in Australia: digital geographies of care in popular culture
Social & Cultural Geography
... TikToks are products of the platform, the content, the contentmakers, those who engage with the content, and the affective forces and relational connections generated with and through these practices, people, and things. TikTok has gained notoriety as a highly popular digital platform that relies on non-expert short-form content creation that can appeal to the typical (young) user seeking entertainment and relaxation as a way of "switching off" from the demands of everyday life (McLean, Southerton, and Lupton 2024). However, its use has expanded rapidly into "serious" topics such as health promotion and education: including for neurological or mental health conditions (McCashin and Murphy 2022;Yeung, Ng, and Abi-Jaoude 2022;Gilmore et al. 2022). ...
... We can therefore view these sociomaterialities of social media use as digitised modes of networked self-optimisation. TikTok provides a valuable opportunity to create and maintain cultures of sharing of personal experiences and feelings that have become so important to intimacies, relational connections, authenticity, and the performing of identities online (Farci et al. 2017;Lupton, Clark, and Southerton 2022;McLean, Southerton, and Lupton 2024). For young people who may have gone through difficult experiences in their offline worlds when attempting to negotiate a dominantly neurotypical world as a neurodivergent person, the contribution made by TikTok content to self-knowledge, potentially leading to a diagnosis, can be important. ...
... For young people who may have gone through difficult experiences in their offline worlds when attempting to negotiate a dominantly neurotypical world as a neurodivergent person, the contribution made by TikTok content to self-knowledge, potentially leading to a diagnosis, can be important. More than this, as previous research on TikTok users has shown, finding a sense of community, connection, and acceptance, a way to communicate with peers who understand, is potentially life changing (McLean, Southerton, and Lupton 2024;Hiebert and Kortes-Miller 2021;Eriksson Krutrök 2021). For those with neurodivergent conditions, networked intimacy and feelings of being seen and known by others who understand what it is like to be autistic or live with ADHD in the context of an ableist world where they have often been socially excluded, bullied, or stigmatised can be affirming. ...
In recent times, the micro-video sharing platform TikTok has become extremely
popular globally, especially among young people. Psychological and
medical topics are among the diverse array of issues addressed on TikTok,
sometimes sparking controversies over how “accurate” or helpful the information
is. One such issue concerns TikTok content relating to self-diagnosis
of neurodivergent conditions such as autism and ADHD. A dominant portrayal
of this phenomenon focuses on the possibilities for self-optimisation such diagnoses can offer. In this article, we discuss these issues from a sociomaterial
perspective, recognising the gatherings of humans, digital platforms, content,
and the affective and relational connections that comprise TikTok assemblages.
Digital sociology is brought together with health sociology and
the sociology of diagnosis to explore how TikToks about self-diagnosis of
ADHD and autism contribute to broader discourses and practices related to
self-optimisation. In particular, the socioeconomic and cultural dimensions
of health and identity issues on TikTok are highlighted. We delve into the contestations over power and authority as they receive expression both in Tik-
Toks and off the platform in medical/“psy” apparatuses of expertise. In so doing,
both the possibilities and the limitations for digitised and algorithmic
self-optimisation related to self-diagnosis via digital media are identified.
... Online platforms can be safe spaces for exploring multiple contextual identities with sophisticated means of controlling the intended audience (bansel 2018, fox & ralsTon 2016, baTes et al. 2020). They can offer relational and intimate affective resources and provide a platform for sharing care and support, which was found to be particularly important for marginalised groups (Mclean et al. 2023). Young people actively use them in the context of their identity negotiations, bringing certain aspects to the fore while deliberately hiding others purposefully in certain circumstances/contexts (raiTHofer et al. 2022). ...
... Even more, shadow banning, i.e. the blocking of users through content moderators of socialmedia platforms, often without informing them, was found by raucHberg (2022) to affect trans, queer and disabled people, particularly in countries outside of North America. In a study with young TikTok users in Australia, Mclean et al. (2023) show how the participants were concerned about shadow banning, homophobic and racist hate speech, but also show how some of them intervened, and exercised agency by reporting problematic posts. ...
... Queer approaches have made suggestions of how the normalising power of code and software can challenge "both social and digital code(s) -or the norm -to show how they constrain normativity but also how forms of intimate life can transgress, disrupt, and distribute what is normal" (cockayne & ricHardson 2017: 1643). In analysing practices of care and repair, Mclean et al. (2023) showed how young TikTok users in Australia used the platform during COVID-19 for responsible practices of care and repair, supporting and responding to each other in navigating the platform and in finding solutions to user problems. ...
The objective of this article is to outline the emerging field of the “digital geographies of mundane violence”, which is characterised by a critical and reflective engagement with the spatialities and dynamic and non-linear temporalities of mediated violence unfolding in entangled online and offline spaces. Going beyond a conventional review of existing literature, we apply Barad’s (2007: 25) “diffractive methodology” to “read through” findings of studies on violence with non-essentialist concepts of entangled online and offline space and spatiality. Given the variety of technologies, forms of violence, and spaces in which violence unfolds, we develop our argument by focusing on a specific type of gender-based violence: (cyber-)bullying of young people identifying with “abundant identities” (Persson et al. 2020: 67) that neither conform to hegemonic heterosexuality and binary gender categories nor are confined to LGBTQI categories. We discuss the ambivalent role of digital technologies in the negotiation and diffraction of difference by young people facing exclusionary identity politics and violent processes of heteronormalisation and heterosexualisation. We present an illustrative research design from our own work, which combines retrospective insights into biographies, family and social relations and media use with a participant-led, mobile, partly in-situ exploration of everyday entangled mediated experiences, practices and negotiations of inclusion, exclusion and violence. Therewith we outline how the contextualities, dynamics, fluidities, non-linearities and variegated historicities behind mediated violence in entangled online and offline spaces can be empirically unpacked. We show how digital technologies are an intrinsic and entangled part of social, cultural, and political negotiations, discourses, and processes, and contribute significantly to the normalisation and everyday (re-)production of diverse forms of violence.
... TikTok is a video-based social media platform that allows users to create and share short-video content ranging from 15 s to 10 min long (McLean et al., 2024;Weimann & Masri, 2023). It is considered one of the fastest growing social media platforms globally, surpassing over a billion users (McLean et al., 2024;Zhang & Liu, 2021). ...
... TikTok is a video-based social media platform that allows users to create and share short-video content ranging from 15 s to 10 min long (McLean et al., 2024;Weimann & Masri, 2023). It is considered one of the fastest growing social media platforms globally, surpassing over a billion users (McLean et al., 2024;Zhang & Liu, 2021). Content posted on TikTok is rapidly disseminated due to its highly interactive features, the power of its algorithm, which is manifested through the "For You Page" (FYP) (Simpson & Semaan, 2021). ...
Background: Transgender and gender diverse ("trans") people are more likely to experience adverse mental health outcomes due to the social adversities that are commonly experienced. One ameliorating factor for poor mental health outcomes can be connection to community, often facilitated in online spaces such as TikTok. Aim: This study aimed to describe the types of content on TikTok that a trans person may encounter. Methods: A digital ethnographic methodology was used. The research team created an account on TikTok, then curated the For You Page (FYP) by engaging in trans-related content. Data was then collected via the first 150 videos that appeared on the FYP. Publicly available demographic variables on the video were collected manually. Videos were included if they were created by Trans creators discussing factors which could impact mental health, such as social support or adversity. Qualitative inductive content analysis was then performed on video content and the top 5 comments to generate categories. Data collection through analysis was performed between September and November 2023. Results: Three main categories were generated: (1) community connection, (2) engaging in discourse, (3) recounting experiences of social adversity. The categories highlight the trans community's willingness to share information, experiences with each other as a form of online support. In addition, trans users were active in engaging with discourses about trans identities and politics. As part of sharing experiences and information, trans users also highlighted the social adversity they have experienced directly tied to their trans identity. Discussion: The results have shown that the curation of the FYP to reflect trans-related content can be a safe space for trans people to find social support. This implies benefits to the use of TikTok on mental health and wellbeing. Future studies should investigate the mental health impacts of engagement on TikTok among trans people.
... J. Waite & Bourke, 2015) rather than those from digital geographies, this trend is gradually shifting. With an emerging dialogue between digital geographies and the geographies of children and young people, there is increasing recognition of the convergence of socio-material and digital realms in shaping young lives, as demonstrated by the five articles in this special issue and beyond (e.g., Bork-Hüffer, Mahlknecht, & Kaufmann, 2021;Finn, 2016;McLean et al., 2023;Reithmeier & Kanwischer, 2020). In other words, this special issue brings together work that intentionally avoids treating material and digital spaces as separate domains when examining topics such as cosplay (Leyman, 2022), labour precarity (Ships, 2024), smart cities (Ghafoor-Zadeh, 2023), slum spaces (Andal, 2023), and (cyber-) violence (Bork-Hüffer et al. under review). ...
... While previous studies have delved into various aspects of TikTok, including user behaviour and experiences (e.g. Heyang & Martin, 2022;McLean et al., 2023;Schellewald, 2023) and the analysis of video content and user responses on the platform (e.g. Avdeeff, 2021;Eriksson Krutrök & Åkerlund, 2023;Lewis & Melendez-Torres, 2024;Zeng & Abidin, 2021), there remains a gap in the representation of TikTok in U.S. news during recent events. ...
TikTok, the most downloaded application in the world for three consecutive years since 2020, has been the target of various bans from governments and organisations. Despite widespread media coverage of such events, the representation of TikTok therein remains underexplored by linguists. This study therefore attempts to examine how TikTok is linguistically represented in U.S. television news after President Joe Biden signed the No TikTok on Government Devices Act into law. The Systemic Functional Linguistics, elaborated in Halliday and Matthiesen (2014), was employed as the analytical framework. The findings revealed that news coverage predominantly uses Material processes, followed by Relational processes. Mental and Verbal processes rank third and fourth, while Existential and Behavioural processes have rather low frequency. Regarding their subtypes, Identifying Relational and Cognitive Mental processes are more prevalent in negative representations, while Attributive Relational and Emotive Mental processes occur more often in positive representations. These transitivity patterns contribute to five main portrayals of TikTok, including “TikTok is a scrutiny and ban target”, “TikTok is a cybersecurity threat”, “TikTok is the Trojan horse of the Chinese Communist Party”, “TikTok is a must-have for many”, and “TikTok is a sales driving force”.
... A study conducted by Pan et al (2023) on female users of tiktok in China found that passive and active users are positively associated with weight-esteem and negatively associated with appearance. Moreover, a study in Australia found that care-related theme like enjoyment, awareness facilitates individuals to express themselves in Tiktok use (McLean et al 2023). People of all ages are equally engaged and take part in using the TikTok platform to make their presence felt and this platform showcases a significant amount of the creative surplus that Generation Z in Bangladesh is catering to (Fatima 2021). ...
This study investigates the factors affecting adoption of TikTok among the students in Dhaka city area. A structured survey questionnaire was developed through the survey tool, Google form and data were obtained from 529 respondents living in various locations of Dhaka city by an online survey method using the social media platform, Facebook. Moreover, the multiple regression analysis was performed to test the research hypotheses. Results show that students perceive this app in a different way and do not consider this app as a great source of enjoyment. Moreover, they do not perceive this app as a decent media of social interaction and informative mirroring the society. Surprisingly , the predictor user generated content is also found as insignificant in the adoption of TikTok by students. This study used a modified TAM model by extending the model with sense of community and user generated content constructs and provided guidelines for marketers to improve their marketing strategies. Finally, the limitations along with future research avenues have been discussed.
Sufficient and accurate information is a requirement for menstrual health and supports adolescents in realising their human rights. As mobile connectivity increases globally, many young people may seek or encounter menstrual health information online through web-based platforms, social media, or health apps. Despite the relevance of online information, menstrual health research and programming have focused on formal and school-based learning. Using a participatory and ethnographic approach over seven months from November 2022 to June 2023, this qualitative study explores how adolescent girls between 13 and 15 years of age in junior high school in two districts of Bali, Indonesia, access and use online information for menstrual health learning. Findings are from 20 group discussions; sessions were held five times with each group across four schools. Fourteen participants also completed solicited diaries, and five participated in interviews. Data are also drawn from participant observation in schools and community spaces. We found that informal online information is a significant source of menstrual health learning and is accessed through active searching and incidental encounters. The motivations to access and use online information were specific to participants’ menstrual health needs. We found that online information presented opportunities for personalised and convenient learning. However, it also presented risks associated with excessive and inappropriate information that caused worry and reinforced menstrual myths. Our findings highlight the need to account for informal online information in future research and programming on menstrual health, particularly in contexts with a high level of mobile connectivity among young people.
This short commentary is intended to be provocative, as we argue the importance of considering ‘other’ aspects of children's everyday experiences of TikTok. We argue the need to be cautious about how the risks of TikTok, and digital platforms at large, for children are often amplified at the expense of erasing public awareness about the joy, connection, and creativity that many children and young people also experience on these emerging platforms. Through this work, we call for a shift in perspective in our research community: a shift that moves away from the assumptions (re)produced by policymakers and media, towards an approach grounded in children's everyday experiences so as to consider the implications of TikTok for children in a positive and generative manner.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, nonbinary and genderfluid adults did information work to discover their gender identities as they explored information on social media, online, and in person. Due to cisnormative restrictions, this information was necessary to identify and validate their gender identity as authentic. During the pandemic, more nonbinary people were able to self-recognize their own gender because there was more time for reflection and more access to nonbinary narratives online, including representations of nonbinary life that defied White, thin, androgynous ideals. By analyzing interviews with 22 U.S. adults who came out as nonbinary during the pandemic, this qualitative study contributes to both the sociological study of nonbinary identity development and to the information science literature on deeply meaningful and profoundly personal information work. This study also contributes to further understanding of why it seems like more nonbinary and genderfluid people “came out” during the height of the pandemic.
TikTok has become one of the most popular social media apps today, its user-generative nature allows anyone to upload videos onto the platform with the potential to become famous. This gives rise to TikTok influencers, and content creators with a large number of followers on TikTok. This paper offers a qualitative study on how the age of TikTok influencers affects their popularity through a literature review and TikTok content analysis. The research result reveals that younger TikTok influencers are more popular than older TikTok influencers. This difference in popularity is a result of the different nature of their video content and ways of presentation. Compared to older influencers, younger influencers tend to have greater content diversity, better technological skills to generate videos with more captivating effects and presentation style, and higher compatibility with TikTok’s user demographics. Furthermore, due to the generation gap between young and old people, the predominately young social media users tend to discriminate against older content creators on the platform, causing them to have more difficulties in gaining popularity.
While TikTok’s popularity has risen dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, so too has concern about misinformation about the virus on the app. Many accounts of the“infodemic”—the war against misinformation being waged alongside the pandemic—call for an emphasis on authority and prioritizing content from official accounts on social media platforms. However, even before the pandemic, health professionals have spread information by drawing on their personality, as well as their medical expertise, as creators on TikTok. Drawing on a digital ethnography project, this article considers what could be learned about the “infodemic” from existing health information-sharing communities and creators on TikTok and examines the affective spaces of information they cultivate. Findings from this ethnography reveal that health information sharing practices on TikTokuse playfulness, memes, and other platform elements, alongside familiar techniques of highlighting one’s expertise and relatability as a healthcare worker.
The video-sharing social media platform TikTok has experienced a rapid rise in use since its release in 2016. While its popularity is undeniable, at the first glance, it seems to offer features already available on previously existing and well-established platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. To understand processes of self-making on TikTok, we undertake two methods of data collection: a walkthrough of the app and its surrounding environment, and 14 semistructured participant interviews. A qualitative analysis of this data finds three distinct themes emerge: (1) awareness of the algorithm, (2) content without context, and (3) self-creation across platforms. These results show that TikTok departs from existing platforms in the model of self-making it engenders, which we term “the algorithmized self”—a complication of the pre-existing “networked self” framework.
TikTok, as an emerging digital geography, has transformed remote communication to a live, instant, and uncannily realistic interaction. To explore the implications of TikTok on older adults, this paper examines the accounts of older Chinese TikTok celebrities – their participation in TikTok as well as the major discourses of ageing mediated by TikTok. An empirical study was conducted by quantitatively analysing web-scraped comments on older TikTok celebrities and by interpreting the themes present in these popular TikTok accounts. The empirical results unveil that TikTok facilitates the social interactions of older digital celebrities by creating a caring environment. However, the healthy ageing paradigm promoted by the Chinese government is also promoted by TikTok's recommendation algorithm and platform capitalism. The healthy ageing paradigm prioritises older adults who are healthy and independent, and as a result marginalises those who have a disease or disability or are dependent on others in some way. As a result, the healthy ageing paradigm promoted by TikTok constitutes another form of ageism. Responding to the call to go beyond “the digital”, our research contributes to digital geography by examining the geographies of ageing mediated by TikTok.
Authenticity, generally regarded as coherence between one's inner self and outward behavior, is associated with myriad social values (e.g., integrity) and beneficial outcomes, such as psychological well-being. Scholarship suggests, however, that behaving authentically online is complicated by self-presentation norms that make it difficult to present a complex self as well as encourage sharing positive emotions and facets of self and discourage sharing difficult emotions. In this paper, we position authenticity as a self-presentation norm and identify the sociomaterial factors that contribute to the learning, enactment, and enforcement of authenticity on the short-video sharing platform TikTok. We draw on interviews with 15 U.S. TikTok users to argue that normative authenticity and understanding of TikTok as a "fun" platform are mutually constitutive in supporting a "just be you" attitude on TikTok that in turn normalizes expressions of both positive and difficult emotions and experiences. We consider the social context of TikTok and use an affordance lens to identify anonymity, of oneself and one's audience; association between content and the "For You" landing page; and video modality of TikTok as factors informing authenticity as a self-presentation norm. We argue that these factors similarly contribute to TikTok's viability as a space for social support exchange and address the utility of the comments section as a site for both supportive communication and norm judgment and enforcement. We conclude by considering the limitations of authenticity as social norm and present implications for designing online spaces for social support and connection.
Algorithms in online platforms interact with users' identities in different ways. However, little is known about how users understand the interplay between identity and algorithmic processes on these platforms, and if and how such understandings shape their behavior on these platforms in return. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 US-based TikTok users, we detail users' algorithmic folk theories of the For You Page algorithm in relation to two inter-connected identity types: person and social identity. Participants identified potential harms that can accompany algorithms' tailoring content to their person identities. Further, they believed the algorithm actively suppresses content related to marginalized social identities based on race and ethnicity, body size and physical appearance, ability status, class status, LGBTQ identity, and political and social justice group affiliation. We propose a new algorithmic folk theory of social feeds-The Identity Strainer Theory-to describe when users believe an algorithm filters out and suppresses certain social identities. In developing this theory, we introduce the concept of algorithmic privilege as held by users positioned to benefit from algorithms on the basis of their identities. We further propose the concept of algorithmic representational harm to refer to the harm users experience when they lack algorithmic privilege and are subjected to algorithmic symbolic annihilation. Additionally, we describe how participants changed their behaviors to shape their algorithmic identities to align with how they understood themselves, as well as to resist the suppression of marginalized social identities and lack of algorithmic privilege via individual actions, collective actions, and altering their performances. We theorize our findings to detail the ways the platform's algorithm and its users co-produce knowledge of identity on the platform. We argue the relationship between users' algorithmic folk theories and identity are consequential for social media platforms, as it impacts users' experiences, behaviors, sense of belonging, and perceived ability to be seen, heard, and feel valued by others as mediated through algorithmic systems.
Since its launch in 2018, TikTok has become one of the fastest growing social media applications in the world, being particularly popular among young people. Memetic videos, which often feature lip-syncing, dance routines, and comedic skits, are a defining feature of the platform. This study used quantitative content analysis and qualitative thematic analysis to examine science memes, an increasingly popular genre of memes on TikTok, by analyzing 1,368 TikTok videos that feature science-related content. The results of the study uncover the most influential science-content creators, the most prevalent content in science memes, and three vernacular styles of science memes on TikTok. The results expand the existing science-communication scholarship focusing on the context of social media. Understanding the role of memetic science content on short-video platforms, as well as in the youth digital culture in general, also provides valuable insights into how science communicators can better engage with members of the young generation.
The microvideo platform TikTok has emerged as a popular hub for self-expression and social activism, particularly for youth, but use of the platform’s affective affordances to spread awareness of important issues has not been adequately studied. Through an exploratory multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of popular climate change-hashtagged TikTok videos, we examine how affordances of visibility, editability, and association facilitate the formation of affective publics on TikTok. We describe how TikTok’s features allow creators to construct and propagate multi-layered, affect-laden messages with varying degrees of earnestness, humor, and ambiguity. Finally, we identify recurring affective themes in popular climate change messages by studying not just in-frame content but also the discursive, intertextual, and memetic linkages that propagate affective publics. Collectively, these audiovisual expressions of personal engagement and awareness demonstrate how media affordances can abet, amplify, and confuse discussions of global issues online. These affordances facilitate a unique kind of activism by helping non-expert users intervene in a discussion that generally takes place among scientists and journalists: the question of how serious a problem climate change is and what to do about it.
Social media, and especially popular youth-focused platforms like TikTok, can offer a valuable window into youth experiences, including their perceptions of online learning. Building on a large-scale thematic analysis of 1,930 TikTok videos posted in March-June 2020, this study examines how young people shared their experiences of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings indicate that youth portrayed online coursework as overwhelming and relentless against the traumatic background of the pandemic. They sought support, empathy, and authenticity from teachers, and both received and provided emotional and educational support to peers on the platform. Students’ home contexts emerged as particularly salient, making visible the intersections between young people’s home, school and social lives. By facilitating a grounded, bottom-up understanding of students’ experiences and perceptions—shared in their preferred spaces and modes of expression—this research stresses the need to attend to youth perspectives to craft more equitable and empowering educational futures.
With its rapid uptake among young people around the world, it is no surprise that TikTok is buzzing with cultures and practices of internet celebrity. Most notably, the platform is becoming more commercial and professionalized with the rise of TikTok Influencers, advertising networks, and agencies dedicated to monetizing content and embedding advertising on TikTok, and top TikTok Influencers raking in millions in income annually. However, little is known about the constitution of internet celebrity on TikTok yet, and existing models of internet celebrity on predecessor apps like Instagram and YouTube do not neatly apply to the distinctive terrain of TikTok. As such, this paper is an exploratory study into the makings of internet celebrity cultures on TikTok, focused on how attention economy and visibility labour practices have emerged as a result of the app’s features. With empirical data drawn from an extended period in-depth digital ethnography, and analyses and insights informed and supported by traditional anthropological participant observation and personal interviews with TikTok Influencers and agencies, this scoping paper offers a foundation for how celebrity, attention, and visibility are constituted across TikTok’s platform norms and features.
Scholars have long been interested in how social media platforms shape user communication and behavior. We add to this literature by critically analyzing the TikTok platform. We argue that the principles of mimesis—imitation and replication—are encouraged by the platform’s logic and design and can be observed in the (1) user sign-up process and default page, (2) icons and video-editing features, and (3) user and video creation norms. These memetic features alter modes of sociality, contributing to what we theorize as imitation publics on TikTok. This analysis extends the meme’s theoretical and methodological utility by conceptualizing the TikTok platform as a memetic text in and of itself and illustrates a novel type of networked public.
Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the
capacities opened by people’s improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.
TikTok is the international twin of China’s mobile short video app, Douyin, and one of the fastest growing short video platforms in the world. Owned by Chinese tech giant, ByteDance, TikTok and Douyin share many similarities in terms of appearance, functionality, and platform affordances; however, they exist in radically different markets and are governed by radically different forces. Unlike other popular mobile media platforms in China and internationally, TikTok and Douyin are neither part of the big three tech giants in China nor the big five in the US. This provides an interesting case study to investigate how an emerging internet company adapts its products to better fit divergent expectations, cultures, and policy frameworks in China and abroad. Using the app walkthrough method informed by platformization of culture production theory, this study highlights the similarities and distinctions between these two platforms. We argue the co-evolution of Douyin and TikTok is a new paradigm of global platform expansion that differs from strategies of regionalization adopted by previous major social media platforms. We contribute to platformization theory by developing the concept of parallel platformization to explain ByteDance’s strategies for surviving in two opposing platform ecosystems in China and abroad.
During the global lockdowns brought about by the Coronavirus crisis, TikTok saw a phenomenal rise in users and cultural visibility. This short essay argues that the media attention paid to TikTok during this time can be read as a celebration of girlhood in the face of the pandemic, and can be seen to contribute to the transformation of girls’ ‘bedroom culture’ (McRobbie and Garber, 2006) from a space previously conceptualised as private and safe from judgement, to one of public visibility, surveillance and evaluation. Focusing on Charli D’Amelio, this essay argues that the increasing visibility of TikTok and rising celebrity of D’Amelio during the Coronavirus crisis continues and intensifies the longer history of young female celebrity culture, and obscures the dangers and impacts faced by girls around the world who are situated outside of the ideals embodied in TikTok stars like D’Amelio.
This article posits that analyses of (cyber)bullying among digitally connected young people need to explore the interdependences, intersections and cON/FFlation of bullying in ONline and OFFline spaces. It combines digital geographers’ works on relationalities between digital and offline spaces with studies on children’s and young people’s geographies and digitization as well as with interdisciplinary work on cyberbullying and traditional bullying in the school context. Drawing on narratives written by young people in Austria, the article lets participants speak through their own voices. There is an urgent need for disparate research examining either or both traditional and cyberbullying, to take note not only of each of their inimitable spatialities, but also their intersections. Through taking a perspective of cON/FFlating spaces we seek to produce a better understanding of the cON/FFlating nature and spaces of bullying in the digital era and to deepen the conceptualization of these interlinked and entangled socio-material-technological spaces.
TikTok is the fastest-growing application today, attracting a huge audience of 1.5 billion active users, mostly children and teenagers. Recently, the growing presence of extremist’s groups on social media platforms became more prominent and massive. Yet, while most of the scholarly attention focused on leading platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, the extremist immigration to other platforms like TikTok went unnoticed. This study is a first attempt to find the Far-right’s use of TikTok: it is a descriptive analysis based on a systematic content analysis of TikTok videos, posted in early 2020. Our findings reveal the disturbing presence of Far-right extremism in videos, commentary, symbols and pictures included in TikTok’s postings. While similar concerns were with regard to other social platforms, TikTok has unique features to make it more troublesome. First, unlike all other social media TikTok’ s users are almost all young children, who are more naïve and gullible when it comes to malicious contents. Second, TikTok is the youngest platform thus severely lagging behind its rivals, who have had more time to grapple with how to protect their users from disturbing and harmful contents. Yet, TikTok should have learned from these other platforms’ experiences and apply TikTok’s own Terms of Service that does not allow postings that are deliberately designed to provoke or antagonize people, or are intended to harass, harm, hurt, scare, distress, embarrass or upset people or include threats of physical violence.
This paper aims to unlock the potential for the politicization of art in the age of the meme. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s ideas, we suggest that technologies of viral reproduction create the tools and conditions for blasting the present moment out of the oppressive vice of classical historiography. While fascism retrenches on “art for art’s sake” in defense of principles of origin, authenticity, and mastery, we envision a politicization of the art of the meme not simply through content but through practice. This paper attempts to engage in this practice through creative invention. We work across two cases, one “real” (Richard Spencer gets punched) and one of our own creation: the viral life and death of Quodlibet, an anachronistic DJ. Our wager is that the blast of now-time that the meme unleashes can be used to lay bare the myth of mastery and open a space for new subjects, forms, and practices. At the same time, we show how the meme is prone to boomerang effects and reterritorializations that can reverse back into fascist aestheticism, the catastrophic status quo, and the dominance of the market. Playfully and without self-seriousness, our goal in this paper is to open the image sphere: to slip into the Internet’s dream house and rummage its drawers for a revolutionary politics.
Gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition and communication, as two elements that point to how racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned even as race becomes an increasingly important difference between who cares and who receives care. Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences in what care means, caring can become risky. The paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality as method allows us to focus on moments and events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should learn not only from its successes but also from instances when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that responds to the distance and difference that race brings to care. That is the promise of good care.
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.
Using several performances undertaken as part of a public art residency, this article discusses creative and playful approaches to social media data. Four pieces are discussed to demonstrate how social media posts can be reappropriated and represented. In this project, geotagged Flickr images were used as a foundation for arts performances to give new meanings to the spaces where the social media post was tagged. This demonstrates a way to bridge the quantitative–qualitative divide through the use of geographic big data in art, enabling scholars to move beyond the visualizations of big data produced by GIScience.
In this paper I discuss the affordances and popularity of the short-video app TikTok from an audience studies point of view. I do so by drawing on findings from ethnographic fieldwork with young adult TikTok users based in the United Kingdom that was conducted in 2020 and 2021. I trace how using the app, specifically scrolling through the TikTok For You Page, the app’s algorithmic content feed, became a fixed part of the everyday routines of young adults. I show how TikTok appealed to them as a convenient means of escape and relief that they were unable to find elsewhere during and beyond times of lockdown. Further, I highlight the complex nature of TikTok as an app and the active role that users play in imagining and appropriating the app’s affordances as meaningful parts of their everyday social life. Closing the paper, I reflect on future directions of TikTok scholarship by stressing the importance of situated audience studies.
The Eurovision song Contest (ESC), amongst others, recognises lesbian, gay, bisexual and, trans (LGBT) people internationally. Limited attention has been paid in understanding bisexual and straight male engagement with the event. This article examines how these fans experience shame around their fandom. It argues that the cultural contestation and the associations of the ESC as a widely perceived gay pastime determine how bisexual and straight male fans make visible their fandom. This paper explores how these fans negotiate their fan and sexual identities in domestic and public spaces, and through digital objects, such as laptops, televisions, and social media platforms. It reflects on the positionality of the gay male fan researcher when conducting interviews with straight male ESC fans. The findings prompt further discussions regarding the technological distinctions between social media ‘apps’ and how users use their respective interfaces to limit exposure to shaming for their fandom and/or sexual orientation. This also includes further examination of the digital objects through which apps are accessed and how they shape socio-sexual lives and identities.
During a tumultuous period marked by a global pandemic, forced lockdowns, and educational institutions going ‘digital by default’, TikTok has emerged as a key platform for teachers to connect and share their experiences. These digital practices have been widely celebrated for providing teachers with an outlet during a challenging time, though little is known about the particulars of TikTok's appeal among teachers and their followers. This article focuses on a teacher from South Australia, ‘Mr Luke’, whose upbeat TikTok videos capturing ‘#teacherlife’ have seen him grow a significant following. Drawing on interviews with Mr Luke and an Australian pre-service teacher who follows him, we consider their thoughts on TikTok and its relationship to professional practice. We identify key factors that have enabled TikTok's popularity among educators, with implications for both teacher education and social media scholarship.
Understandings of digital technologies as tools to manage deficit, or conversely as mediators of harm, are prominent for young people in migrant communities negotiating the impacts of geographic isolation. Young people in these contexts emerge at the nexus of several categories of so called ‘disadvantage’ occupying spaces in the geographic and ethnic margins with curtailed independence. This paper provides an opportunity to progress discussions about young migrants beyond the city by putting dualistic, determinist approaches aside and answering calls from digital geographers to clarify the production of place through locational digital media. The production of rural place among culturally diverse young people highlights everyday uses of digital media to mediate locally embedded socialites while pointing to the place-making capabilities routinely practiced by the young participants.
Young people’s lives are inextricably tied in with the digital, whether it is for education, engagement, leisure, or work. Studies from the Global North have examined children and social media from several perspectives, with discourse now veering towards a rights-based approach to foreground young people’s voices in a digital and social media world, something that is missing in countries like India. This paper drew on deep interactions with young people from a large Indian city to gain preliminary insights into social media practices and modes of engagement with particular reference to management of access, privacy, safety, and negotiating challenges or problem solving. Our study suggests that conversations about digital platforms, particularly social media spaces, in relation to children’s everyday life practices need to begin early, at the point when children begin interacting with these technologies. Critical digital literacy must recognize the agency of young people, their naturalized interactions with the digital world, as well as the complexities of family and school life that moderate such interactions. These contextual nuances become significant when framing regulatory policies, parental advisories and critical digital literacy and media education programs. This article adds to the slowly growing literature from the Global South that enhances and diversifies our understanding of how the ‘born digital’ generation lives with/in social media.
Settler societies habitually frame Indigenous people as ‘a people of the past’—their culture somehow ‘frozen’ in time, their identities tied to static notions of ‘authenticity’, and their communities understood as ‘in decline’. But this narrative erases the many ways that Indigenous people are actively engaged in future-orientated practice, including through new technologies. Indigenous Digital Life offers a broad, wide-ranging account of how social media has become embedded in the lives of Indigenous Australians. Centring on ten core themes—including identity, community, hate, desire and death—we seek to understand both the practice and broader politics of being Indigenous on social media. Rather than reproducing settler narratives of Indigenous ‘deficiency’, we approach Indigenous social media as a space of Indigenous action, production, and creativity; we see Indigenous social media users as powerful agents, who interact with and shape their immediate worlds with skill, flair and nous; and instead of being ‘a people of the past’, we show that Indigenous digital life is often future-orientated, working towards building better relations, communities and worlds. This book offers new ideas, insights and provocations for both students and scholars of Indigenous studies, media and communication studies, and cultural studies.
Leading medical and public health societies endorse comprehensive sex education, but only 20 states and Washington, D.C., currently require information about contraception when sex education is taught, and even fewer require the inclusion of topics such as gender diversity or consent. At the same time, social media use, especially the video-sharing app TikTok, is increasing among teens. TikTok, therefore, offers a novel opportunity to make up for shortcomings in sex education and convey sexual health information to adolescents. To describe the availability and content of sexual education on TikTok, we conducted a content analysis of themes for 100 sex education–focused videos. We found that female anatomy was the most frequently addressed topic. Sexual pleasure was the second most common theme, within which discussions of the female orgasm and arousal constituted the most common subtheme. Other common themes include contraception and sexual health. These sought-after topics may be incongruent with those presented in standard school- or home-based sex education or interactions with health care providers, and this disconnect suggests opportunities for health care providers and educators to initiate conversations or offer resources on these themes as part of routine interaction. We conclude with recommendations for future research to consider the factual accuracy of sex education on TikTok and determine how exposure to this content affects adolescents’ understanding of the risks and benefits of intercourse, sexual practices, age- and gender-based sexual norms, and other health behaviors.
Around the world, digital geographies have been renegotiated in the COVID-19 pandemic, from increased surveillance with digital devices to facilitation of new spatial boundaries for work and recreation. Digital storytelling has emerged as a ubiquitous way to communicate care, and sometimes enact harm, at multiple scales during COVID-19. Digital technologies are allowing people to share narratives and experiences that capture how they adapt, recover, and resist the damaging aspects of health and economic crises via digital technologies. We focus on care to appreciate the diverse ways that humans and more-than-humans are coproducing digital geographies while facilitating narratives that maintain and repair our worlds so we can live as well as possible. But harm is also facilitated by digital storytelling and considering how the same technologies facilitate opposite processes makes for challenging digital spaces and analysis. A digital geographic approach helps to read the effects of these changes as it uses an integrated lens on spatial and justice issues. As the boundaries between public and private places have blurred with spatial and physical distancing, digital devices are mediating, enabling, and constraining forms of care and harm with a new intensity.
Popular media and policy discussions of digital health for supporting older people in the ‘super-aged’ context of Japan often focus on novel technologies in development, such as service robots, AI devices or automated vehicles. Very little research exists on how Japanese people are engaging with these technologies for self-care or the care of others. In this article, we draw on our ethnographic research with Japanese families engaging in digitised self-care and intergenerational care to show how more mundane and well-established digital media and devices – such as the LINE message app, digital games and self-tracking apps – are contributing to digital kinship, mediated co-presences and care relations. We argue that these practices involve enactments of care that are benevolent and intimate forms of datafication and dataveillance that have emerged in response to the recent disruption of traditional face-to-face forms of health care and family relationships in Japan.
TikTok’s popularity ignites anxieties about youths’ privacy on the short-video sharing social media platform. This is especially true for 8–12-year-old ‘tweens’. This study draws from in-depth interviews with tweens and their parents to explore perceptions of tweenhood, TikTok and privacy. In our investigation, we move beyond a developmental framework on childhood by taking into account how life stage categories are socio-culturally constructed. The results indicate a dialectical relationship between TikTok and tweenhood: Participants construct TikTok as a liminal networked public that is in-between child’s play and teenage pop culture. This dialectical relationship subsequently informs how parents conceptualize and manage tweens’ privacy on TikTok. Parents’ assumptions about their children’s privacy practices, however, do not necessarily match tweens’ capabilities to negotiate boundaries between the public and private. Overall, our findings reveal that socio-cultural imaginations of life stage categories and networked publics shape privacy discourses and practices.
Background
The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is viewed as a critical tool to protect against six HPV-related cancers. Vaccination is recommended from early adolescence through age 26 years. As young people have become increasingly involved in personal health-related decisions, there is a need to tailor HPV vaccine messaging and reach this priority population on social media and digital outlets. TikTok is a growing social media platform with approximately 70% of its users between the ages of 13 and 24 years.
Purpose
The aim of this study was to understand HPV vaccine messaging and interactions on TikTok as a needed first step to identifying effective strategies to reach young people with important health messaging.
Methods
Content analysis was performed on 170 top TikToks focused on the HPV vaccine. TikToks were assessed for content, classification type, and number of interactions.
Results
Most TikToks were provaccine, while antivaccine TikToks had more user interactions. Cancer and prevention were the main content areas of the analyzed provaccine TikToks, while the side effects were the primary focus of antivaccine messages. Approximately 30% of all top TikToks analyzed were developed by health professionals. TikToks without an explicit vaccine opinion primarily described personal experiences and mentioned side effects most often.
Implications
TikTok is a growing social media platform that can be used to reach young people and encourage HPV vaccine uptake. Health professionals need to consider the interest that users have in personal experiences and address antivaccine narratives related to side effects.
This article investigates how safety is experienced, navigated and cultivated by women on Instagram. Using qualitative interview data, we explore women’s understanding and practices of keeping themselves and others safe when sharing information-rich images about their exercising bodies and fitness activities. Drawing on literatures from feminist leisure, sport and media studies, this article advances discussions about exercising women’s negotiations of risk and safety by considering digitally-mediated fitness experiences and the uses of “visibility and vulnerability” for creating cultures and communities of physical and emotional safety online and offline. Findings identify that knowledge of Instagram’s platform affordances and audiences, along with personal ethics, contribute to exercising women’s decision-making when posting self-produced physical activity content. We extend current thinking about the operations of visibility and vulnerability for women online by identifying the significance of spatial and relational elements to generating women’s feelings of safety on Instagram.
The ways that people must now manage and negotiate the uncertainty of austerity involves access to the internet, digital devices and the skills to use them. The Universal Credit welfare system in the UK, for example is now online, however access and skills can be uncertain or sporadic for some. At the same time, digital technology is not simply a ‘way out’ of precarious situations and many people have ambivalent relationships with ‘the digital’, including some of the 40 young white working-class men we interviewed living in physically isolated coastal towns in England, after a decade of austerity policies have added to their socio-economic exclusion. Here, we explore how the digital is folded into patterns of uncertainty and insecurity through an examination of the material, affective and everyday relationships that young men have with digital technologies. We add to arguments about the geographies of austerity by exploring the spatial and temporal patterns that emerge as young men attempt to access the internet. We also contribute to the growing field of digital geographies by exploring the contradictory emotional and affective relationship young men have with digital technologies, to highlight how the digital always emerges in relation to power, producing new forms of inequality and identities. We argue that geographers must remain sensitive to these complex and contradictory relationships with digital technologies if they are to be used to disrupt processes of marginalisation, exclusion and uncertainty.
Often the switch to telecare technology used to help caretakers provide treatment to their patients off-site is portrayed as either a nightmare scenario or a much needed panacea for all our healthcare woes. This widely researched study probes what happens when technologies are used to provide healthcare at a distance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of both patients and nurses involved in telecare, Jeannette Pols demonstrates that instead of resulting in less intensive care for patients, there is instead a staggering rise in the frequency of contact between nursing staff and their patients. 'Care at a Distance' takes the theoretical framework of telecare and provides hard data about these innovative care practices, while producing an accurate portrayal of the pros and cons of telecare.
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.
Geographers have long considered mobile phones to be ubiquitous instruments and agents of globalisation, migration, commodification, and technologies for fieldwork. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with families and communities in Greater Manchester, amidst nearly a decade of austerity cuts in the UK, this paper makes the case for revitalising, repoliticising and rematerialising the mobile phone in this socio-economic context. Drawing on concepts of vital materialism and vibrant matter, I illustrate the relationalities, resonances and recalcitrance of the mobile phone as a necessary utility, part of the fabric of everyday life in austerity, as well as a vital object and life in itself. Using a vignette approach, findings highlight experiences, mediations and material politics of companionship, indebtedness, gendered labour, financial independence, social isolation, vulnerability and durability, intimacy, sensuality and more. In the conclusions, I reflect on the everyday politics of the mobile phone during and in spite of austerity, including in a period of ongoing welfare digitalisation.
Race and racism are defining characteristics of life in American society. Technology and other knowledge production tools are created within this racist context and generate information that, when (mis)used, worsen inequities for already marginalized people. Race after Technology takes readers on a provocative journey into technology’s role in perpetuating racism. In this book, Benjamin explores the myriad of ways in which technology reinforces systemic oppression in America, creating a digital dragnet which codes people by stigmatizing them for where they live, work, and play. Technology codifies discriminatory practices in a way that results in racist responses to social problems. It succeeds by excluding some groups from taking part in its design, intent, implementation, and results. While it strives to present with an “allure of objectivity,” the content of technology reflects the biases of its creators and the motivations of its sponsors. It twists society like a fun-house mirror where the principles of Jim Crow and the “illusion of [racial] progress” persist.
Recent scholarship on smart cities and platform urbanism has explored the very wide range of data harvested from urban environments by digital devices of many kinds, analysing how not only efficiencies but also profits are sought through the extraction, circulation, transformation, commodification, integration and re‐use of data. Much of that data is generated by smartphone applications, and this paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartphone apps by a range of different actors in a smart UK city. The apps are understood as a co‐constitutive interface between data circulations and embodied users. The paper focusses specifically on the data that the apps generated and shared and on how the app designers anticipated that the data would create different kinds of value for embodied app users. While some data circulations were understood as ways of generating financial value, the paper argues that a number of other forms of value were assumed in the app design. The paper identifies two of these, which it terms normative values and interactive values. It examines how the data mobilised by the smart city apps enacts particular versions of these values, and how those values co‐constitute specific kinds of bodies, agencies and geographies in digitally‐mediated cities.
This book examines the changing digital geographies of the Anthropocene. It analyses how technologies are providing new opportunities for communication and connection, while simultaneously deepening existing problems associated with isolation, global inequity and environmental harm. By offering a reading of digital technologies as ‘more-than-real’, the author argues that the productive and destructive possibilities of digital geographies are changing important aspects of human and non-human worlds. Like the more-than-human notion and how it emphasises interconnections of humans and non-humans in the world, the more-than-real inverts the diminishing that accompanies use of the terms ‘virtual’ and ‘immaterial’ as applied to digital spaces.
Digital geographies are fluid, amorphous spaces made of contradictory possibilities in this Anthropocene moment. By sharing experiences of people involved in trying to improve digital geographies, this book offers stories of hope and possibility alongside stories of grief and despair. The more-than-real concept can help us understand such work – by feminists, digital rights activists, disability rights activists, environmentalists and more. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this book will appeal to academics, university students, and activists who are keen to learn from other people’s efforts to change digital geographies, and who also seek to remake digital geographies.
This paper develops an agenda for a broadened conceptualisation of urban caring within geographical research. We open by identifying three existing domains of urban care research: examining spaces of care, materialities of care, and asking who are the subjects of care? We then synthesise three platforms that can be the foundation of a geographical theory and approach to urban care. Drawing from feminist care research and recent keystone pieces on urban caring, we argue, first, that there is a need for a broadened conceptualisation of urban care that emphasises the universal need for care and care that supports human and non‐human flourishing. Second, we propose an expanded scale of urban care analysis that attends to the ways that lives are lived within and through the city. Third, we open up an analysis of where care is located in cities, arguing for the value of locating urban care beyond interpersonal care and care through welfare, to urban governance and planning, markets, and more‐than‐human materialities. We conclude by conceptualising how care might inform utopian dreamings for the just and caring city. We challenge urban geographers to think through the possibilities of care to transform cities.
New learning and teaching methods such as 'blended learning' are increasingly promoted within higher education institutions. Such methods – especially those which replace slow scholarship and/or people with digital technologies – run the risk of reinforcing neoliberal learning spaces and perpetuating processes of 'deep colonization' (Rose, 1996). We argue that these new learning and teaching methods must be grounded in critical pedagogies to avoid extending neoliberal agendas in the university context. Furthermore, we propose these methods require careful student and teacher reflection, coupled with conscientious attempts at decolonising existing educational institutions and pedagogies (Radcliffe, 2017). In this article we explore the intersections and disconnections between critical pedagogy, attempts at decolonising the classroom, and flexible learning approaches like blended learning. We draw on our collective experiences as both teachers and students who are continuously learning – learning-teachers and learning-students – within the context of a higher level subject entitled 'Rethinking Resource Management' which is taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. A blended learning approach is practiced by the learning-teachers of this course, in an effort to situate their responsibilities and shift their pedagogy towards decolonizing approaches. In this dialogue between learning-teachers and learning-students, we argue that while blended learning can provide opportunities to improve learning experiences and support decolonising pedagogies, constraints that arise from a neoliberal university context, such as the reframing of students as clients and the prioritisation of money-saving approaches, can moderate such promise. Further, decolonising education requires more than what can be delivered by blended learning approaches in isolation. They also fundamentally require a careful reconfiguration of responsibilities in a relational and multidirectional manner, of learning-teachers, learning-students and the broader learning-institution context. So while the learning-teachers' efforts at decolonising the classroom and better engaging with learning-students remain partial, they are deeply valued by many learning-students and are important tentative contributions towards nurturing more 'care-full' decolonising learning spaces. The article offers a critical discussion of the issues raised in a dialogue between learning-teachers and learning-students of Rethinking Resource Management, and considers what we can contribute to broader debates in decolonising learning, the blended learning trend and structural changes in universities. We offer this instance of care-full teaching and learning as a case study that emphasises dialogue, in multiple modes, to renegotiate power relations, and to advocate caution in moves toward top-down entrenchment of digital teaching modes.
In this article we advance geographies of commemoration by focusing on digital screens, a common element of museum displays and other official memory sites, arguing that screens are crucial in how people not only think, but feel in and about such places. As a part of the ‘texture’ of memory sites, we will discuss how understandings of the content displayed on digital screens can mingle with screens’ material and immaterial qualities to constitute a range of powerful ways of ‘feeling’ this texture, in affective, material and sensory terms. By interrogating the experience of visitors to the Camp des Milles, an official French national memory site, we will consider how digital screens can thicken the experience of such sites by framing them as bodily and intimate – but also how encounters with such technologies can disappoint, disrupt or puncture the atmospheres of such sites, and draw out feelings of frustration or annoyance that might pull against the official aims of such places. We use in-depth visitor accounts to show how digital screens afford affective resonances for visitors and intensely shape how state-sponsored histories are encountered, understood and felt.
Friendship has potential as a key coping and self-care strategy among early career researchers (ECR’s) and has been shown to be crucial to overall well-being and sense of belonging, but its importance as a response to career pressures is not well studied. For ECR’s, friendships within the university are situated in a specific structural and institutional context, and formigrant women, this includes an additional aspect of gendered complexity. At the same time friendships may prove difficult as heightened neoliberal metrics emphasize competition forfunding, positions and teaching requirements. Using autoethnographic intra-reflections on the authors’ own friendship, bridging human geography and physical geography, this paper examines friendship of two ECR women from a homosocial perspective where institutional hierarchies and structures may be somewhat equalized. Drawing on the exploration of the authors’ friendship during their PhD years and into their post-doc positions, we reflect on the importance of friendship as an act of support, self-care and resistance. We argue for heightening importance for examining the way friendship creates safe social spaces and offer new insights into the importance of friendships in career paths. Friendship in the neoliberal academy has transformative potential for creating a culture of well-being in geography.
In 2013, an online movement called GamerGate gained notoriety and would reflect the reach, scope, and severity of harassment in social media. This chapter looks at a timeline of Gamergate, platforms where it flourished, characteristics of the movement, and connections to scholarly work on gaming culture and feminism.
Care ethics provides us with not only the framework for understanding people's relationality but attention to the very fact that relations matter in structuring society. However, not all caring relations result in care, despite their power in structuring society. This paper follows Raghuram's (2016) argument to “trouble care” in order to bring more attention to the diversity of caring practices, actors, and politics in our worlds to better explore contentious caring relations. Through analyzing a high profile campus sexual assault case, this paper extends research on care beyond traditional caregiving relationships and demonstrates how these nontraditional caring actors exhibit a diversity of caring practices in a variety of spaces. The concept of “caring agencies” is introduced to bring deliberate attention to the ways that diverse caring practices have political ramifications that stretch beyond the immediate situation of care and expose systematic power differentials among care-givers, care-receivers and those beyond these categories. The case study in this paper, People v. Turner, offers insights into the pervasive culture of sexism that enables and results in harmful and unjust caring agencies which perpetuates conflict in society. Further research is called for to expose provocative and uncomfortable case studies of care to expand our analyses of care and relations of power.
This article explores the effects of people's digital coexistence on the construction of difference and feelings of aversion to or recognition of “others”. It seeks to make a theoretical contribution to works on the geographies of difference and encounter, Internet or digital geography, as well as on migration and digital media, by highlighting the relevance of indirect and fleeting digital encounters and the dialectical process in which Encounters play out in intertwined, specific and multiple digital and physical spaces that we define as “cON/FFlating situational places of encounter”. Based on a qualitative study with Chinese, Filipino and German migrant professionals in Singapore, it shows how fleeting digital encounters take an ambivalent role through challenging but also producing new “temporary fixings of difference”. As such they can engender new sensibilities for and openness toward the host society but also breed new, or aggravate existing, cultural stereotypes and prejudices. The findings show that inherited and instituted classificatory practices that people use to structure and make sense of their fleeting interactions with others in offline space are, where possible, transferred and imposed on encounters in digital space. At the same time, they are inflected or replaced with new markers of difference where ingrained sorting mechanisms applied in offline space did not help them make sense of encounters in digital space.
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