And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference is Ursula Shepherd, whose focus is on negative social media discourses about sexual violence survivors seeking justice. The voices of victim-survivors are often weakened by the failures of the criminal justice system, leading them to seek informal justice through public discourse – including by naming and shaming the perpetrators online and thereby protecting others. This may happen in fully public spaces, or more controlled online environments.
But negative discourses that downplay abuse or denigrate victim-survivors may also affect other survivors; this is a significant concern. How …
The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Tess Arnold, whose focus is on fan responses on social media to the ‘failed finales’ of popular TV shows.
Such failures may be due in part to the creators or showrunners of such shows, who are built up as television auteurs who are featured in entertainment media nearly as much as the cast themselves; to the show’s fans, who engage in textual poaching to create their own fan fiction, fan art, and other derivative content that celebrates and extends the show’s participatory culture; and/or …
This week I’m in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference, and after a morning of workshops the first session I’m attending has started with Qianzao Yang, whose focus is on the phenomenon of the ‘hot nerd’ as constructed on social media in China. This concretises and reconstructs contemporary cultural capital, and valorises university credentials, the STEM disciplines, and international experience in desirable locations.
It appreciates a ‘scholarly aura’, expressed through visible middle-class taste and lifestyles; intelligence and knowledge are transferred here into visible signs of attractiveness, and this reflects broader hierarchies of education and social status. At …
