Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi Problem: What the internet reaction tells us about the relationship between media and consumers.

/ Harry T Dyer / Leave a comment

A while ago I wrote a blog post about the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge; a craze taking the internet by storm (or, at least, heavily reported across various media channels – but that’s a distinction for whole other blog post…) in which people filmed/photographed themselves trying to get fuller lips by creating a vacuum around them. The results were obviously not great, and it led to many a think-piece about ‘kids these days’ being stupid, passive, and gullible. I always think this reaction is incredibly patronising to a generation who, according to recent data, are showing adept media literacy and criticality in a landscape with far more sources competing for attention. It is always worth remembering that we all did stupid things as kids. I did a million stupid things, including swallowing my mum’s earring for a game of hide-and-seek. The difference was of course that I didn’t have a camera in my face and an internet to project my failings onto (until now I guess). The earring never emerged, but I’m sure I’m fine…

 

But nonetheless, many a reaction was formed about how gullible the current emerging generation are, a far too simplistic narrative that I think needs to be problematized and examined, rather than assumed. Interestingly, this narrative can be further challenged by a more recent reaction to another Jenner sister’s media forays.

 

Today another Jenner sister was trending in the media for an entirely separate reason. Kendall Jenner starred in an incredibly tone-deaf Pepsi advert that borrowed the imagery and timbre of many current protest movements in a move of crass neoliberalism, highlighting some of the greediest aspects of capitalism. It was a move that many people saw through, and that garnered a wealth of criticism cross the board. Many posts will be written today about what just how misguided and offensive this advert is, and that is a much needed reaction. Here however I want to briefly unpack just what this reaction means for how we think about the relationship between media and audience.

Continue reading →

Advertisement

Call For Papers on Language, New Media and Alt-Realities

/ Harry T Dyer / 4 Comments

If you’re interested in/researching ‘fake news’, alternative facts, clickbait, and/or the ‘decline’ of ‘experts’ (really not sure how many scare quotes to use here…) then check out this call for papers below. Sounds like a really interesting conference. The submission deadline is a little tight, but I’m going to try to attend if nothing else!

 

Details below:

 

Language, New Media and Alt-Realities

April 21, 2017, University of Reading

Proposals are invited for 20 minute paper presentations as well as posters/web-based presentations addressing the theme of ‘language, new media and alt.realties’.

Possible areas of interest include:

·       New media epistemologies and ontologies

·       New media discourse and political polarisation

·       Algorithmic pragmatics and political debate

·       Authoritarian and populist discourses online

·       ‘Trolling’ as a form of political discourse

·       Agnotology (the cultural construction of ignorance)

·       The crisis of ‘expertise’

·       ‘Fake news’ and ‘clickbait’

·       Hacking and disinformation

·       Infotainment and spectacle

·       Conspiracy theories and memes

·       Journalism in the age of social media

Please send your proposals in the form of a 250-word abstract to Prof Rodney Jones, University of Reading r.h.jones@reading.ac.uk

Deadline for Submitting Proposals: April 5, 2017

We need to talk about Growing Up Digital…

/ Harry T Dyer / Leave a comment

The new Growing up Digital report came out in the UK today from the Children’s Commissioner (Find it here).  It’s a nuanced report with many interesting ideas and thoughts about the internet. It acknowledges that children are on the internet more, and that this is not going to change. It acknowledges the internet can be a great place (It literally starts with the sentence “The internet is an extraordinary force for good…”). It suggests that children need to be taught critical skills online as well as offline. It’s really nuanced and well written.

So why is it that nearly all the press reporting on this is SO APPALLING?! Continue reading →

Online anonymity: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

/ Harry T Dyer / 7 Comments

An article came out today by J. Nathan Matias (find it here, it’s really interesting) calling for a re-examination of online anonymity, which for so long has been painted as a pantomime villain that automatically leads to abuse and problematic behaviour.

In the article J. Nathan Matias argues in essence for a reversal of the approach to anonymity and abuse, calling for a re-evaluation of online abuse that acknowledges the fact that it is and obviously is not solely an online phenomenon, but that it emerges from pre-existing social structures and resources. This is really interesting, especially in the wake of a re-emergence of anonymous platforms such as Yik Yak (before the update) and ask.fm.

Continue reading →

What social media data should I use in my research? A response to Choi et al (2016).

/ Harry T Dyer / 3 Comments

Firstly, apologies for not blogging in quite a while; I’ve been finishing off my PhD which I’m super happy to announce I passed, with no corrections B-). It’s been a long process but I’m really proud of the finished product and I’m working on getting publications and a book out from it ASAP. Stay tuned for more news!

Secondly, and to get to the point of this post, a great article has just been published entitled “What social media data should I use in my research?: a comparative analysis of Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and the New York Times comments”.

It’s been put out by a group of researchers from the State University of New Jersey. Namely Dongho Choi, Ziad Matni, and Chirag Shah. It was presented at the 79th ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Copenhagen a few months ago (October 2016). The full link to the article can be found here.

It’s a really great article, and it is truly truly great to see people moving towards a broader definition of social media. For far too long, Facebook and Twitter have held a relatively unchallenged monopoly over social media research. It’s easy to understand why; they are currently the most popular platforms by some distance in the western world. They also put out a staggering wealth of content to analyse and utilize. In many ways, they present perfect spaces through which to understand a range of issues, and they produce rich and detailed data.

However, thanks to the pioneering work of researchers such as Paul Hodkinson, Deborah Lupton, Sonja Utz, Rachel Kowert, Nicole Ellison, Xuan Zhao, Caleb T. Carr, and many others, digital research is again spreading out and looking at the social internet in its messy and overlapping entirety. That means embracing multiple platforms and exploring a range of spaces that contain various social elements. This should be encouraged, especially as recent statistical research from PEW (Lenhart, 2015) shows that young people are increasingly present on multiple platforms. Users are not using one platform alone; they exist in and across multiple spaces, and are increasingly using a broad array of platforms beyond Facebook and Twitter alone. As such, in order to understand the experiences of users online, a broader focus is needed, lest digital research gets left a decade behind the progressing reality of social media for many users.

Continue reading →

Choosing research participants for Digital Research

/ Harry T Dyer / Leave a comment

I’m just writing up the sampling section of my thesis, so I’m revisiting this now. I’m so glad I decided to allow the participants to tell me their story. As I say in the blog, the data collected may not be considered data-rich in the sense that Kozinets implies, but nonetheless, this paper was left with incredibly rich data.

Harry T Dyer

What constitutes an appropriate or useful research participant for Digital Research? What criteria do we want our research participants to match? What even is a normal Digital user?

These are some of the questions we can often begin to ask ourselves when approaching Digital Research. What sort of participants do we want, and what makes a participant particularly useful/useless? What traits should we look for in our participants?

View original post 1,056 more words

Picturing the Social Conference

/ Harry T Dyer / Leave a comment

 

This sounds like such a great event. Below the break is the details of a one-day conference on June 20th in Manchester with some really awesome people talking about image sharing and online visual culture. Thanks to the always awesome Mark Carrigan for the heads-up about this one! If you’re not following him I thoroughly recommend that you do!

As the internet becomes increasingly multi-modal, and as an increasingly diverse range of Social Media sites are becoming purposefully heterogeneous, understanding visual culture is so important.

What’s so great about this event, and what I love about Digital Sociology at the moment is it’s really broad in scope. So many fields with so many epistemological stances all want to try and understand the increasingly ubiquitous role of Social Media. We need this diverse input in the field, we need to throw open the doors and try and come at this from a range of perspectives.

I cannot make the day so I’m going to follow along online, but I thought I’d flag it up for all those up north interested in Visual Culture and wanting to look at it from a purposefully broad perspective. More of this sort of thing please!

Continue reading →

Curating identity online. Why do we insist that this is a unique feature of online social interaction?

/ Harry T Dyer / 1 Comment

I’ve been noticing a trend in the discussion of Social Media

In digital research there has been a move towards accepting that the internet is now a mundane and routine part of life, and as such an equal move away from distancing social media and the internet writ large from the rest of everyday life. Most researchers accept that the internet has quickly become routine. Rather than being a sparkly wonder for which we had to schedule time in our day to sit down and literally plug in, it has become accepted, ubiquitous, and demystified.

We have lifted the curtain and found that Oz is just some old white guy.

Research is now accepting that the internet is not a space to escape everyday life but a space in which we continue to project and live everyday life via new modes and new mediums.

However, researchers still seem to want to put some of the sparkle back into the internet; they still want to see it as something special and unique in some way. And in part this is true. The internet offers new possibilities, new ideas, new opportunities, new methods… BUT not everything that happens on the internet is unique and solely found online.

Continue reading →

Reflection and Diffraction

/ Harry T Dyer / Leave a comment

This is just awesome, some really interesting thoughts for any researcher on the importance of reflection but also the restrictions. Well worth reading and thinking about

Blogging as Inquiry

I’ve been trying to get my head around why posthumanists assert that diffractive thinking is more useful than reflection. Karen Barad uses optical analogies throughout her agential realist treatise and I want to play around with her ideas using images and some creative thinking. Truly understanding this holds great importance for the methods I employ in research as well as my research in transitions. Reflection and reflexivity (personal transformation as a result of reflection) are core components of qualitative and transition research. If an alternative idea works better, I need to own it.

Reflection

Barad talks about reflection in terms of a mirror and reflexivity as a mirror of mirrors.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? That’s what I do when I look in a mirror. I check myself out. Am I too fat? Do I look good in this colour? This…

View original post 459 more words