It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:
And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Jim Brown, whose interest is also in Mastodon’s Fediverse. The move from Twitter to Mastodon following Twitter’s muskification was slow and halting in part because it was seen as a new silo whose community was smaller that Twitter’s, which ignores the federated aspects of Mastodon as a platform – why is this so, and how may it be overcome?
There are many historical examples of federation, from FidoNet and other past platforms to labour unions and other offline community practices; these are concerned with person-to-person but especially also with group-to-group …
The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Aram Sinnreich and Rob Gehl, whose focus is on governance challenges for Mastodon’s Fediverse. Other social media platforms tend to fail due to the clash between the profit motives of platform operators and the community interests of users; this should enable it to bypass some of the pitfalls for civic engagement on corporate social media. Yet there may be other challenges for community-driven, federated social media like Mastodon – indeed, there are a number of other platforms that now build on the ActivityPub protocol that is best-known for underpinning Mastodon.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Cindy Fang, whose interest is in the early days of the Clubhouse social media platform – an invite-only audio app that became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and attracted a number of high-profile users (including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk). This userbase can be understood as a networked public, structured by the platform’s affordances – or in this case, networked listeners and active producers of content.
Clubhouse also provided a sense of community, with audio streams and comments on that content; this produces some social capital for prominent participants which is …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Allegra Rosenberg, whose interest is in fan art. This is now a big business, with fan-created fiction and fan-created imagery being provided for pay on various platforms. This is not uncontroversial, however; the fan site Archive of Our Own (AO3) has a long-standing ban against linking to for-profit sites, for instance.
But there has also been a slower commercialisation of fan content from the bottom up; this shows the increasingly normative acceptance of commercial exploitation. Fan sites for specific cultural phenomena are often run in collaboration with commercial interests, for instance …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Kyle Moody, who shifts our focus to branding and consumption markets in cultures; much fandom is tied up with such branding activities. In particular, the focus here is on Twitch, where affective labour and fan work collides with the gig economy of media content creation.
Twitch has made the individual easier to reach (and achieve reach) than ever before; most streamers are not backed by major gaming companies, but act as single agents who create gaming broadcast content and in doing so must adopt and follow certain performance practices: this may …
The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Lauren Rouse and Mel Stanfill, whose interest is in fan communities on Tumblr. The latest overall demographic information for fandom communities is now ten years old, which is not particularly helpful; the team therefore developed a survey covering user demographics that was distributed via the r/Fanfiction subreddit, Tumblr, and Twitter; fans are still mostly cisgender women, but nonbinary gender identities and bisexual, asexual, and queer sexual orientations now dominate in this community. This is well above global averages, and may point to an overrepresentation of particular groups in survey respondents; similarly …
It’s that time of the year, and I’m in Philadelphia for the 2023 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (continuing my 21-year streak of attending AoIR), which starts in earnest with the keynote by Aymar Jèan ‘AJ’ Escoffery. His focus is on reparative media, and he begins by noting that it feels like our collective harms are intensifying. This is exacerbated to some extent by corporate media, who often distribute the equivalent of fast, globally consumable food rather than slow and locally relevant content. This perpetuates injustices which require a particular approach to repair, including grassroots (re)distribution.
The next speaker at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Theodora Sutton, who has studied a digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay area, Camp Grounded. This takes place in nature and bans digital technology, real names, work talk, watches, and drugs and alcohol.
Theodora used this event as a starting-point for an ethnographic exploration both of the Camp Grounded experience itself and of the participants’ technology usage practices back in the everyday world. After the Camp Grounded experience, there was a flurry of Facebook friending between participants even in spite of the ‘no real names’ policy, which involved …
