- Internet research, Internet Reserach Methods, Ethnography, Ethnography of Communication, Digital Culture, Digital Ethnography, and 27 moreQualitative methodology, Qualitative Research, Qualitative Methodology (Sociology), Sexual Identity, Online Communities, Social Media, Social Constructionism/ Constructivism, Constructivism, Ethnomethodology, Narrative Methods, Narrative and Identity, Media Anthropology, Digital Media, New Media, Online Journalism, Digital Story Telling, Paywalls, Iphones, Facebook, Google, Digital Marketing, Virtual Revolution, Youtube, Sociology, Communication, Media, and Social Theoryedit
- Social media researcher. Interests include visual self presentation on social media (selfies in particular), gender,... moreSocial media researcher. Interests include visual self presentation on social media (selfies in particular), gender, sexuality, embodiment and dominant normative ideologies.
http://kkatot.tumblr.comedit
How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data... more
How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Our analysis shows that young people rely heavily on canonic binaries from utopian and dystopian interpretations of networked technologies to apply labels to themselves, others, and social media in general. As they are prompted to reflect on their experience, their rhetoric about social media use and its implications becomes more nuanced yet remains inherently contradictory. This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings. Our unique methodology for generating deeply self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic narrative accounts suggests a way for scholars to be able to understand the ongoing struggles for meaning that occur within the granularity of everyday reflections about our own social media use. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI • Human-centered computing → Social media • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing • Applied computing → Sociology 1 Social media can be defined as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange
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This is my talk from Digital Subjectivity and Mediated Intimacies at Coventry last week. People said they’d like to have access to it, and I’m not sure if I have the juice to turn it into An Actual Academic Publication rn, so here it is,... more
This is my talk from Digital Subjectivity and Mediated Intimacies at Coventry last week. People said they’d like to have access to it, and I’m not sure if I have the juice to turn it into An Actual Academic Publication rn, so here it is, as is, for now. It approaches visuality via concepts of affordances and situational proprieties, offers a set of 7 high level affordances social media has for showing and looking, uses the metaphor or horizon and foxes, which gave people many feelings at the time, and is overall entirely too tl:dr for a blog post, because it was a 45 min talk.
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What is the connection between body-image, visual economy and selfies? Why is our relationship with our appearances so tense? Why are we so often called self-centered, narcissistic and superficial? And what do selfies have to do with it... more
What is the connection between body-image, visual economy and selfies? Why is our relationship with our appearances so tense? Why are we so often called self-centered, narcissistic and superficial? And what do selfies have to do with it all?
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this is a video of a session on various methods of analyzing digital images online (in particular selfies). I talk about visual narrative analysis (from 56 min onwards)
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We are surrounded by the ‘powerful and seductive’ images - art, ads, icons, comics, family albums, memes and selfies. The ease of exchanging images in the digitally saturated environment of ubiquitous camera-phones makes the communicative... more
We are surrounded by the ‘powerful and seductive’ images - art, ads, icons, comics, family albums, memes and selfies. The ease of exchanging images in the digitally saturated environment of ubiquitous camera-phones makes the communicative potential of images incredibly high. This talk explores the selection and posting of GPOY (gratuitous picture of yourself), gif (graphics interchange format) and ‘current status’ images commonly used in social media as acts of meaning making and belonging.
Part 1: http://bambuser.com/v/5018371
Part 2: http://bambuser.com/v/5018381
Part 1: http://bambuser.com/v/5018371
Part 2: http://bambuser.com/v/5018381
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Self and Identity, Reproduction, Social Media, Feminism, and 14 moreSelf Identity, Abortion, Sexuality Studies, Maternity, Queer, Twentieth-Century Australian History, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Tumblr, GIF, Selfie, Gpoy, Lesbian and Gay History, Citrizenship, and Sexualtiy Gender and National Identity
Over past twenty years, pregnancy has become publicly visible. Following the then-scandalous Vanity Fair cover of a heavily pregnant and naked Demi Moore in 1991, flaunting one's baby-bump has become almost a rite of passage for... more
Over past twenty years, pregnancy has become publicly visible. Following the then-scandalous Vanity Fair cover of a heavily pregnant and naked Demi Moore in 1991, flaunting one's baby-bump has become almost a rite of passage for celebrities, and through that a staple in our visual culture. Women now are managing their pregnancies in the crossfire of medical, moral and consumerist narratives, balancing these to the best of their ability to make sure they are 'doing it right'. Photography can a means of communication, construction and memory. Images teach us how to see and limit what is a part of our world through what we deem photographable. Snapshot photography in particular is known for erasing a plethora of lived experiences and focusing on reproducing and embellishing the status quo. In this talk I will trace the tensions between cultural and people's personal narratives of 'doing it right' in terms of pregnancy by focusing on images Russian speaking and English speaking pregnant women post on Instagram, a mobile image-sharing platform lauded for its incessant growth in the last couple of years. Taking and sharing selfies is often dismissed as frivolous and narcissist by the pundits, but increasing scholarship on self-expression and self-representation on social media, particularly through images, suggests that the subjectivities, practices and social use of selfies can be rather complex and deserve empirical readings. I will offer a couple that have come out of my summer at Microsoft.
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Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille.
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This article is based on the keynote address at the 3rd Sexual Cultures Conference, which took place in May 2019 in Turku, Finland. The article analyzes my participants’ experiences and expressions of loss, betrayal and nostalgia as they... more
This article is based on the keynote address at the 3rd Sexual Cultures Conference, which took place in May 2019 in Turku, Finland. The article analyzes my participants’ experiences and expressions of loss, betrayal and nostalgia as they reacted first to the news, then the implementation and finally the aftermath of the tumblr ‘porn ban’ of December 2018. I surface pleasure as the key to conceptualizing what my participants felt was special about the NSFW tumblr, and why tumblr without NSFW is a loss on a broader scale.
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This chapter addresses the impossible situations, decisions, and what-if imagi- naries researchers are faced with daily, especially if undertaking qualitative and/or internet research and/or with vulnerable populations and/or on sensitive... more
This chapter addresses the impossible situations, decisions, and what-if imagi- naries researchers are faced with daily, especially if undertaking qualitative and/or internet research and/or with vulnerable populations and/or on sensitive topics. It aligns with voices arguing that standardized procedural research ethics are inad- equate, and builds on existing work in situational, practice based and feminist ethics to suggest a care based ethical practice. The key to this care based practice of research ethics lies in a particular kind of relationality. This relationality, in turn, is fed by trust, and germinates empathy. The chapter works through the concepts and the phenomena of significant relations, trust, and empathy by drawing examples from my ethnographic research with a community of people, who post (semi)naked selfies of their bodies online (constituting a qualitative, internet research study of a sensitive topic, and thus arguably with a vulnerable population). I describe some of my choices and actions that seem to have worked well to build trusting, emphatic and ethical research relationships, and finish the chapter by offering some suggestions and questions that might help those trying to practice an ethics of care.
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This article explores the experiences and practices of self-identifying female sexual age-players. Based on interviews and observation of the age players' blogged content, the article suggests that, rather than being fixed in one single... more
This article explores the experiences and practices of self-identifying female sexual age-players. Based on interviews and observation of the age players' blogged content, the article suggests that, rather than being fixed in one single position, our study participants move between a range of roles varying across their different scenes. In examining accounts of sexual play, we argue that the notion of play characterizes not only their specific routines of sexual "scening" but also sexual routines, experimentations, and experiences more expansively. Further, we argue that a focus on play as exploration of corporeal possibilities allows for conceptualizing sexual preferences and practices, such as age-play, as irreducible to distinct categories of sexual identity. The notion of play makes it possible to consider sexuality in terms of transformations in affective intensities and attachments, without pigeonholing various preferences, or acts, within a taxonomy of sexual identities. In doing so, it offers an alternative to the still prevalent categorical conceptualizations of sexuality that stigmatize people's lived experiences and diminish the explanatory power of scholarly and therapeutic narratives about human sexuality.
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This paper has two objectives: to explicate the sociotechnical conditions that facilitate critique on social media platforms (specifically: Tumblr); and to operationalize a “working theory” from Foucault’s conceptualization of critique.... more
This paper has two objectives: to explicate the sociotechnical conditions that facilitate critique on social media platforms (specifically: Tumblr); and to operationalize a “working theory” from Foucault’s conceptualization of critique. We analyze resistant practices observed (in ethnographic study) in a Not Safe For Work (NSFW) community on Tumblr, arguing that the potential for critique arises there at the intersection of platform architecture and use cultures. Specifically, we show how critique emerges from shared practices of ethics, most visibly enacted through what we call voluntary vulnerability and paying it forward. This potential for critique is arguably at risk with Tumblr’s recent NSFW ban.
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This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists' perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn,... more
This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists' perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn, situated in how activists understand the broader Estonian LGBT community, and Estonian society's historico-politically complex relationship with activism as such. The article is theoretically grounded within the new social movement theories and theories of emergent LGBT and activist identities. The analyzed material consists of interviews, observations, documents and meeting notes gathered via ethnographic fieldwork with Estonian LGBT activists in 2012-2013. Pragmatic and iterative qualitative analysis revealed that the activists studied resist the activist identity, and perceive there to be a weak collective identity among the broader Estonian LGBT population. However, the lobbying for the Registered Partnership Law (passed in 2014) brought a shift in LGBT activists' ways of enacting their identities and their perception of the possibility of LGBT activism in Estonia.
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This article focuses on a phenomenon where reading fiction for pleasure, digital reading and play intersect - internet fanfiction. I offer a brief and exploratory analysis of the experiences of a small group (7 people) of devoted and... more
This article focuses on a phenomenon where reading fiction for pleasure, digital reading and play intersect - internet fanfiction. I offer a brief and exploratory analysis of the experiences of a small group (7 people) of devoted and experienced, adult fan-fiction readers in order to understand the affective, cognitive and social dynamics of their reading practices. Participants’ fanfiction reading is conceptualized as a playful practice of openness, curiosity and enthusiasm for experimentation2. I suggest that by viewing digital reading as play we can understand more about reading practices. Arguably, it is this playfulness, which makes reading fanfiction immersive, perhaps even addictive, even when consumed via screened devices and on websites that are commonly linked to distracted attention and difficulties with reading for longer periods of uninterrupted time. Thus, reading fanfiction may be informative, both for understanding reading in the digital age, for planning interventions to get people to read more (fiction) and for understanding and developing multiliteracies in the era of information overload and ubiquitous scrolling.
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This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists' perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn,... more
This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists' perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn, situated in how activists understand the broader Estonian LGBT community, and Estonian society's historico-politically complex relationship with activism as such. The article is theoretically grounded within the new social movement theories and theories of emergent LGBT and activist identities. The analyzed material consists of interviews, observations, documents and meeting notes gathered via ethnographic fieldwork with Estonian LGBT activists in 2012–2013. Pragmatic and iterative qualitative analysis revealed that the activists studied resist the activist identity, and perceive there to be a weak collective identity among the broader Estonian LGBT population. However, the lobbying for the Registered Partnership Law (passed in 2014) brought a shift in LGBT activists' ways of enacting their identities and their perception of the possibility of LGBT activism in Estonia. Keywords Activist identities, deployment of identity for action, Estonia, LGBT activism, LGBT collective identity, LGBT identity, young LGBT activists Sexualities 0(0) 1–18
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Introduction to the special issue on Networked Publics based on the papers presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference 2017 (AoIR2017)
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This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of... more
This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Special Issue contributes specific cases and fine-grained conceptual distinctions to ongoing discussions about the ethics in data-driven research. In the second decade of the 21st century, a grand narrative is emerging that posits knowledge derived from data analytics as true, because of the objective qualities of data, their means of collection and analysis, and the sheer size of the data set. The by-product of this grand narrative is that the qualitative aspects of behavior and experience that form the data are diminished, and the human is
removed from the process of analysis. This situates data science as a process of analysis performed by the tool, which obscures
human decisions in the process. The scholars involved in this Special Issue problematize the assumptions and trends in big data research and point out the crisis in accountability that emerges from using such data to make societal interventions. Our collaborators offer a range of answers to the question of how to configure ethics through a methodological framework in the context of the prevalence of big data, neural networks, and automated, algorithmic governance of much of human socia(bi)lity.
removed from the process of analysis. This situates data science as a process of analysis performed by the tool, which obscures
human decisions in the process. The scholars involved in this Special Issue problematize the assumptions and trends in big data research and point out the crisis in accountability that emerges from using such data to make societal interventions. Our collaborators offer a range of answers to the question of how to configure ethics through a methodological framework in the context of the prevalence of big data, neural networks, and automated, algorithmic governance of much of human socia(bi)lity.
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Tiidenberg, Katrin (2017). “Nude selfies til I die” – making of ‘sexy’ in selfies. P.G. Nixon, Isabel Düsterhöft (Eds.) Sex in the Digital Age. Routlege
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How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data... more
How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Our analysis shows that young people rely heavily on canonic binaries from utopian and dystopian interpretations of networked technologies to apply labels to themselves, others, and social media in general. As they are prompted to reflect on their experience, their rhetoric about social media use and its implications becomes more nuanced yet remains inherently contradictory. This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings. Our unique methodology for generating deeply self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic narrative accounts suggests a way for scholars to be able to understand the ongoing struggles for meaning that occur within the granularity of everyday reflections about our own social media use.
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This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over- 50 looks like, and whether it could... more
This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over- 50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two dominant themes (fitness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical elements (motherhood and self-sufficiency) through which women make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of a healthy, fit, fashionable, independent, self-sufficient, and happy mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology, but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within. Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non- existent visibility is offered.
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This article develops and troubles existing approaches to visual selfrepresentation in social media, questioning the naturalized roles of faces and bodies in mediated self-representation. We argue that selfrepresentation in digital... more
This article develops and troubles existing approaches to visual selfrepresentation
in social media, questioning the naturalized roles of faces
and bodies in mediated self-representation. We argue that selfrepresentation
in digital communication should not be treated as synonymous
with selfies, and that selfies themselves should not be reductively
equated with performances of embodiment. We do this through discussing
“not-selfies”: visual self-representation consisting of images that do
not feature the likenesses of the people who share them, but instead
show objects, animals, fictional characters, or other things, as in the
practices of #EDC (“everyday carry”) and #GPOY (“gratuitous picture of
yourself”) on platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and reddit.
We present an account of self-representation as an emergent, recognizable,
intertextual genre, and show that #EDC and #GPOY practices are
best conceptualized as instances of self-representation.
in social media, questioning the naturalized roles of faces
and bodies in mediated self-representation. We argue that selfrepresentation
in digital communication should not be treated as synonymous
with selfies, and that selfies themselves should not be reductively
equated with performances of embodiment. We do this through discussing
“not-selfies”: visual self-representation consisting of images that do
not feature the likenesses of the people who share them, but instead
show objects, animals, fictional characters, or other things, as in the
practices of #EDC (“everyday carry”) and #GPOY (“gratuitous picture of
yourself”) on platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and reddit.
We present an account of self-representation as an emergent, recognizable,
intertextual genre, and show that #EDC and #GPOY practices are
best conceptualized as instances of self-representation.
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This article analyzes how pregnant women perform their pregnancies on Instagram. We ask whether they rely on and reproduce pre-existing discourses aimed at morally regulating pregnancy, or reject them and construct their own alternatives.... more
This article analyzes how pregnant women perform their pregnancies on Instagram. We ask whether they rely on and reproduce pre-existing discourses aimed at morally regulating pregnancy, or reject them and construct their own alternatives. Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly stalked in its celebrity manifestations. This propagates narrow visions of what a “normal” pregnancy or “normal” pregnant woman should be like. We argue that pregnant women on Instagram do pregnancy via three overlapping and complimentary discourses of “learn it,” “buy it,” and “work it.” Together these form the current authoritative knowledge of pregnancy we call “intensive pregnancy” as performed on Instagram. Concurrently, this article highlights how the combined discursive power of hashtags, images, and captions may influence and enforce discursive hegemonies.
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This article analyses Estonian youth's perceptions of their own political participation and their practices of participation on social media. We analysed 60 interviews with Estonian informants in a MYPLACE study and relied on a conceptual... more
This article analyses Estonian youth's perceptions of their own political participation and their practices of participation on social media. We analysed 60 interviews with Estonian informants in a MYPLACE study and relied on a conceptual broadening that acknowledges the political potential of everyday. We relay on theories of standby citizenship and spiral of silence to understand signing petitions, commenting, liking and sharing politically minded content online. Based on this we suggest that young people in Estonia are interested in political issues and public opinion and their social media use represents a diversifi cation of how citizens take part in civic matters. However, youths do not necessarily believe in the effi cacy of social media in enacting political change and their reasons for not participating can be seen as indicative of a desire for both impression management and being aff ected by the spiral of silence. Keywords: new repertoires of political participation, youth social media practices, social media and political participation, perceptions of participation.
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chapter in 'Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations, Bridging the Gap in Youth Research'
Edited by Dan Woodman, Andy Bennett
Edited by Dan Woodman, Andy Bennett
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(now open access through the attached link) This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie-practices engage with normative, ageist and... more
(now open access through the attached link)
This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie-practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. By engaging in interactions and feeling part of a community, taking and sharing selfies make possible changing experiences of their bodies for women. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy-selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of 9 women in the NSFW self- shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self- affirmative and awareness rising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom.
This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie-practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. By engaging in interactions and feeling part of a community, taking and sharing selfies make possible changing experiences of their bodies for women. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy-selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of 9 women in the NSFW self- shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self- affirmative and awareness rising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom.
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This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com. By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds... more
This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com. By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds of conflicts that arise around how selfies and images are used. These are about: (a) reactions to photo-shopped images, (b) altering other people’s selfies and/or reposting them as your own, (c) misunderstandings from separating text from image (caption-stripping), (d) disrespecting the self-shooters’ way of curating their blogs. Boundary theory as well as concepts of social afterlife of content and assumed trust are used to illuminate that images, including selfies, have significant, yet different meanings to different people and play an important part in creating and maintaining meaningful relationships and communities.
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This paper is based on visual narrative analysis of cyber-ethnographic material from a 2.5 year field-research with ‘not safe for work’ [NSFW] bloggers and self-shooters on tumblr.com. I use Koskela’s concept of ‘empowering... more
This paper is based on visual narrative analysis of cyber-ethnographic material from a 2.5 year field-research with ‘not safe for work’ [NSFW] bloggers and self-shooters on tumblr.com. I use Koskela’s concept of ‘empowering exhibitionism’, Waskul’s ‘erotic looking glass’, and Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ to analyze self-shooting (taking photos of one-self). Constricting societal norms of sexuality, body shape and body practices influence how my participants (N=20, 10 female, 9 male, 1 transgender, ages 21 - 51, average age 34) live their embodied and sexual lives. Through self-shooting and by negotiating the community specific issues of control, power and the gaze, they are able to construct a new, empowered, embodied identity for themselves.
I look at self-shooting and selfie-blogging as a practice of reclaiming control over one’s embodied self AND over the body-aesthetic, thus appropriating what is and is not ‘sexy’. The NSFW self-shooting community offers a safe space otherwise so hard to find within the body/sexuality-normative mainstream culture. This makes self-shooting a collective therapeutic activity. In their self-images participants construct themselves as ‘beautiful’, ‘sexy’, ‘devious’, ‘more than just a mother and an employee’ and as someone who ‘likes their body instead of trying to not hate it’. The technologies of the self activated through diaristic blogging and selfie sharing, along with the empowerment from interactions with peers take bloggers on a path of sexual awakening and reintroduce them to their own bodies.
I look at self-shooting and selfie-blogging as a practice of reclaiming control over one’s embodied self AND over the body-aesthetic, thus appropriating what is and is not ‘sexy’. The NSFW self-shooting community offers a safe space otherwise so hard to find within the body/sexuality-normative mainstream culture. This makes self-shooting a collective therapeutic activity. In their self-images participants construct themselves as ‘beautiful’, ‘sexy’, ‘devious’, ‘more than just a mother and an employee’ and as someone who ‘likes their body instead of trying to not hate it’. The technologies of the self activated through diaristic blogging and selfie sharing, along with the empowerment from interactions with peers take bloggers on a path of sexual awakening and reintroduce them to their own bodies.
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This chapter explores visual narrative analysis as a way of making sense of images and the texts that accompany them in digitally saturated environments. Building on cases of analyzing selfies, their captions, comments and tag-words; as... more
This chapter explores visual narrative analysis as a way of making sense of images and the texts that accompany them in digitally saturated environments. Building on cases of analyzing selfies, their captions, comments and tag-words; as well as conflicts sprung from the use and misuse of various images on tumblr.com, it emphasizes the analytical potential of opening up the narrative approach to include stories told in images, words; as well as stories told in words about images and vice versa. We do not live in a uniquely visual time—and as humans, we have a long history of using visuals for communication. Yet, the abundance of apps, platforms and technologies built to make our participation in the visual culture and economy seamless means that to not take them seriously would reduce a research- er’s grasp on the worlds of their research participants, particularly young ones. The chapter offers both the benefits and the difficulties of using visual narrative analy- sis based on practical examples of studying the stories of production, audiencing and the images in people’s narratives of the self.
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""High-modernity and practical-hermeneutic approaches to identity focus on how people craft their identities through interaction, how ‘narratives of self’ are created in concert with others and out of the diverse contextual resources... more
""High-modernity and practical-hermeneutic approaches to identity focus on how people craft their identities through interaction, how ‘narratives of self’ are created in concert with others and out of the diverse contextual resources within reach. This is true both off-, and online, however in the increasingly connected world, a growing amount of these discourses are digital. People spend more and more of their time online (according to comScore Canadian average was 45.3 hours; USA 38.6, UK 35.4 in Q4. 2011) and communicating in SNSs ruled people’s online time (23% in the USA), taking more than twice as much as the #2 activity (online games) in Q3 2011 according to The Nielsen Company.
This chapter focuses on the way bloggers with ‘not suitable for work’ (NSFW) blogs on the micro- blogging site tumblr. reflect on their experience. More precisely, on how their blogging, online interactions, and their sense of belonging to a community inform the different narratives of self. Pleasure helps group norms and values get integrated into one’s sense of self, hence a sexuality-related, playful online community can have a significant impact.
Based on in-depth interviews with NSFW bloggers, I will illustrate participants’ identity narratives in terms of their diachronic identity formation through time and space and their synchronic sense of self as it emerges in comparison to other people and in how agency is used when constructing the narrative. The different ‘We’s’ one sees oneself as a part of, as well as the juxtaposition of social and internal/psychological agency is explored. This chapter will contribute to understanding internet as a space for identity work and construction of social reality.
keywords: identity; social networking sites; blogs; online communities; narratives.""
This chapter focuses on the way bloggers with ‘not suitable for work’ (NSFW) blogs on the micro- blogging site tumblr. reflect on their experience. More precisely, on how their blogging, online interactions, and their sense of belonging to a community inform the different narratives of self. Pleasure helps group norms and values get integrated into one’s sense of self, hence a sexuality-related, playful online community can have a significant impact.
Based on in-depth interviews with NSFW bloggers, I will illustrate participants’ identity narratives in terms of their diachronic identity formation through time and space and their synchronic sense of self as it emerges in comparison to other people and in how agency is used when constructing the narrative. The different ‘We’s’ one sees oneself as a part of, as well as the juxtaposition of social and internal/psychological agency is explored. This chapter will contribute to understanding internet as a space for identity work and construction of social reality.
keywords: identity; social networking sites; blogs; online communities; narratives.""
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This article explores how the polyamorous self gets storied on NSFW (not safe for work) blogs of tumblr., and the ways the scripting involved in this practice reconfigures the meanings attached to one’s self, body and sexuality. The... more
This article explores how the polyamorous self gets storied on NSFW (not safe for work) blogs of tumblr., and the ways the scripting involved in this practice reconfigures the meanings attached to one’s self, body and sexuality. The article relies on case-based narrative analysis, where I work the interface of ethnographic material (two year field study), textual blog content, images and individual and group interviews with polyamorous bloggers. I contextualize it via concepts of sexual scripting (Gagnon & Simon, 1973), elements of Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self - particularly critical self-awareness and self-care - and Koskela’s (2004) concept of ›empowering exhibitionism‹. Sexual and romantic behaviors are often cloackd in silence and executed in privacy because of feelings of guilt and anxiety, especially so in the case of practices that fall outside of the mono-normative grand narrative still cultivated in our society. Online one can challenge the scripted norms that regulate sexual behavior and our identities as sexual beings.
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This article is based on a presentation given at the 7th Annual CGC Conference and focuses on the sexuality narratives of bloggers with ‘not suitable for work’ (NSFW) blogs on the micro-blogging site tumblr. The following will illustrate... more
This article is based on a presentation given at the 7th Annual CGC Conference and focuses on the sexuality narratives of bloggers with ‘not suitable for work’ (NSFW) blogs on the micro-blogging site tumblr. The following will illustrate three different narratives of sexual self and sexuality that are constructed via
the experience of blogging, online interactions, and belonging to the commu- nity. Previous literature points to the fact that the meaning of being involved in something that has to do with sex (and a large part of NSFW can be categorized as sex related) is changing very rapidly. It is more and more tied to discourses of consumerism or therapy, to the expression of self-identity and creation of commu- nities. This article will illustrate said changes via three narratives of (a) “more than just sex”, a narrative of (b) “play”, and a narrative of (c) “exploration and kink”.
the experience of blogging, online interactions, and belonging to the commu- nity. Previous literature points to the fact that the meaning of being involved in something that has to do with sex (and a large part of NSFW can be categorized as sex related) is changing very rapidly. It is more and more tied to discourses of consumerism or therapy, to the expression of self-identity and creation of commu- nities. This article will illustrate said changes via three narratives of (a) “more than just sex”, a narrative of (b) “play”, and a narrative of (c) “exploration and kink”.
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Research Interests: Affordance and Publics
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This article explores how the polyamorous self gets storied on NSFW (not safe for work) blogs of tumblr., and the ways the scripting involved in this practice reconfigures the meanings attached to one's self, body and sexuality. The... more
This article explores how the polyamorous self gets storied on NSFW (not safe for work) blogs of tumblr., and the ways the scripting involved in this practice reconfigures the meanings attached to one's self, body and sexuality. The article relies on case-based narrative analysis, where I work the interface of ethnographic material (two year field study), textual blog content, images and individual and group interviews with polyamorous bloggers. I contextualize it via concepts of sexual scripting (Gagnon & Simon, 1973), elements of Foucault's (1988) technologies of the self-particularly critical self-awareness and self-care-and Koskela's (2004) concept of ›empowering exhibitionism‹. Sexual and romantic behaviors are often cloackd in silence and executed in privacy because of feelings of guilt and anxiety, especially so in the case of practices that fall outside of the mono-normative grand narrative still cultivated in our society. Online one can challenge the scripted no...
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Cet article se focalise sur un phenomene ou la lecture de fiction, pour le plaisir, la lecture numerique et le jeu s’entrecroisent- la fanfiction sur Internet. Je propose une analyse breve et exploratoire des experiences d’un petit groupe... more
Cet article se focalise sur un phenomene ou la lecture de fiction, pour le plaisir, la lecture numerique et le jeu s’entrecroisent- la fanfiction sur Internet. Je propose une analyse breve et exploratoire des experiences d’un petit groupe (7 personnes) de lecteurs adultes devoues et experimentes de lecture de fanfiction afin de comprendre les dynamiques affectives, cognitives et sociales de leurs pratiques de lecture. La lecture de fanfiction des participants est conceptualisee en tant que pratique ludique d’ouverture, de curiosite et d’enthousiasme pour l’experimentation . Je suggere qu’en regardant la lecture numerique comme jeu, nous pouvons comprendre davantage des pratiques de lecture. C’est sans doute le cote ludique qui rend la lecture de fanfiction immersive, peut-etre meme addictive, meme quand elle est consommee via des dispositifs d’ecran et sur des sites web qui sont generalement lies a une attention distraite et a des difficultes a lire pendant des periodes plus longues...
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Political participation is seen as a prerequisite for democratic governance (Lamprianou, 2013) but past decades have seen a steady decrease in electoral turnout and voting among younger generations in most European countries. This paper... more
Political participation is seen as a prerequisite for democratic governance (Lamprianou, 2013) but past decades have seen a steady decrease in electoral turnout and voting among younger generations in most European countries. This paper explores youth’s social media practices and the social imaginary of their political passivity. Using Estonian data from a 14-country European study Memory, Youth, Political Legacy And Civic Engagement (MyPLACE, 2011-1015) we thematically analysed in-depth interviews (60) in 2 contrasting sites and contextualized it with survey results from all participating countries. Instead of questioning how social media enables activism (Papacharissi & Oliveira, 2012, Coleman, 2013) or contrasting political commitment in internet based and physical-space activism (Morozov, 2011), our interest lies with understanding young people’s social media practices that could be considered a form (political) participation (liking and sharing political critique and parody, si...
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The 2017 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers took place in Tartu, Estonia, and was focused on networked publics, which, as the call for papers highlighted, “play an important role in shaping the political, social,... more
The 2017 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers took place in Tartu, Estonia, and was focused on networked publics, which, as the call for papers highlighted, “play an important role in shaping the political, social, economic, cultural but also moral, ethical and value-laden landscapes of contemporary life.” This special issue is comprised of papers presented at the conference (AoIR 2017) and its doctoral colloquium, and engages with the affordances that networked communication technologies (social media platforms, websites, internet based governmental or corporate infrastructures for voting or banking) have for the emergence or maintenance of networked publics; but also, and more specifically, the affordances that these networked publics have for manifestations of human affect, sociality and sociability. Our collaborators undertake analyses of networked publics of solidarity and hate (Nikunen, this issue; Kuo, this issue), connection and disconnection (Dremlj...
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Especially the second set of AoIR guidelines for research ethics (Markham and Buchanan 2012) demonstrate that progress can be made in laying out useful approaches for analyzing and resolving at least very many of emerging ethical... more
Especially the second set of AoIR guidelines for research ethics (Markham and Buchanan 2012) demonstrate that progress can be made in laying out useful approaches for analyzing and resolving at least very many of emerging ethical challenges facing Internet researchers. But of course, new research possibilities, contexts, and approaches continue to issue in sometimes strikingly novel ethical difficulties that may challenge in turn more established frameworks and guidelines. Critical to the ongoing development of Internet Research Ethics (IRE), then, is to bring forward new cases and difficulties that, as in previous cycles of guideline development, will serve as fruitful foci for reflection and deliberation that then contribute to both improving our abilities to respond to such new challenges and, eventually, the articulation of subsequent guidelines. Hence, our roundtable showcases important examples of contemporary research ethics issues – most especially as these are evoked by new...
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We are surrounded by the ‘powerful and seductive’ (Rose, 2001, p.10) images - art, ads, icons, comics, family albums, memes and selfies. The ease of exchanging pictures in the digitally saturated environment of ubiquitous camera-phones... more
We are surrounded by the ‘powerful and seductive’ (Rose, 2001, p.10) images - art, ads, icons, comics, family albums, memes and selfies. The ease of exchanging pictures in the digitally saturated environment of ubiquitous camera-phones makes the communicative potential of images incredibly high. This paper explores the selection and posting of GPOY (gratuitous picture of yourself), gif (graphics interchange format) and ‘current status’ images [from now on referred to as GPOY] commonly used in social media as acts of meaning making and belonging.
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Sex and Social Media offers a curious reader an academically informed yet accessible discussion of the nuances of sexual social media and socially mediated sex, giving a much-deserved space to explore the multiplicity and richness of... more
Sex and Social Media offers a curious reader an academically informed yet accessible discussion of the nuances of sexual social media and socially mediated sex, giving a much-deserved space to explore the multiplicity and richness of sexual practices online.
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Research Interests: Psychology and Routledge
Front pages and sample from the introduction of Katrin Tiidenberg's book "Selfies, why we love (and hate) them" (2018)
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How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data... more
How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Our analysis shows that young people rely heavily on canonic binaries from utopian and dystopian interpretations of networked technologies to apply labels to themselves, others, and social media in general. As they are prompted to reflect on their experience, their rhetoric about social media use and its implications becomes more nuanced yet remains inherently contradictory. This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings. Our unique methodology for generating deeply self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic narrative accounts suggests a way for scholars to be able to understand the ongoing struggles for meaning that occur within the granularity of everyday reflections about our own social media use.
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Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of... more
Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books. Together, the papers offer an analysis of TikTok, WeChat, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. Because of the book-length analyses preceding the panel, we are able to distill what is distinct and recognizable about these platforms – what we call ‘platform specificities’ and demonstrate how these specificities are shaping not only the experiences of the users of those platforms, but the social media ecosystem more broadly. The panel contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding platform power, social media and ways of making sense of social media, painting in board strokes plausi...
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Although sex an essential part of the human experience, there are increasing attempts to remove it from social media. This paper brings together two researchers’ extensive research (~ 50 total interviews between 2011 and 2020, an extended... more
Although sex an essential part of the human experience, there are increasing attempts to remove it from social media. This paper brings together two researchers’ extensive research (~ 50 total interviews between 2011 and 2020, an extended 2011 to 2018 ethnography with a community of NSFW bloggers on Tumblr, and a year-long observation of multiple sex related Reddit communities) with people who have incorporated various social media platforms and apps into their sex lives. Out of the analysis of this material, we argue that analyses relying on people’s lived experiences mandate a sex-positive but platform-critical approach to sex on social media, where sex deserves to be part of social media for consenting adults.
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This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists’ perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn,... more
This article explores how Estonian LGBT activists make sense of their own activism. We analyze the activists’ perceptions of their activism, their identities and how those identities are deployed for action. All of these are, in turn, situated in how activists understand the broader Estonian LGBT community, and Estonian society’s historico-politically complex relationship with activism as such. The article is theoretically grounded within the new social movement theories and theories of emergent LGBT and activist identities. The analyzed material consists of interviews, observations, documents and meeting notes gathered via ethnographic fieldwork with Estonian LGBT activists in 2012–2013. Pragmatic and iterative qualitative analysis revealed that the activists studied resist the activist identity, and perceive there to be a weak collective identity among the broader Estonian LGBT population. However, the lobbying for the Registered Partnership Law (passed in 2014) brought a shift in...
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This article analyzes how pregnant women perform their pregnancies on Instagram. We ask whether they rely on and reproduce pre-existing discourses aimed at morally regulating pregnancy, or reject them and construct their own alternatives.... more
This article analyzes how pregnant women perform their pregnancies on Instagram. We ask whether they rely on and reproduce pre-existing discourses aimed at morally regulating pregnancy, or reject them and construct their own alternatives. Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly stalked in its celebrity manifestations. This propagates narrow visions of what a “normal” pregnancy or “normal” pregnant woman should be like. We argue that pregnant women on Instagram do pregnancy via three overlapping and complimentary discourses of “learn it,” “buy it,” and “work it.” Together these form the current authoritative knowledge of pregnancy we call “intensive pregnancy” as performed on Instagram. Concurrently, this article highlights how the combined discursive power of hashtags, images, and captions may influence and enforce discursive hegemonies.
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While “digital dualism,” the notion that online life is categorically different from offline, either as a site of utopian or dystopian imaginings, has largely been discredited (Jurgenson 2012), we have barely begun to understand the ways... more
While “digital dualism,” the notion that online life is categorically different from offline, either as a site of utopian or dystopian imaginings, has largely been discredited (Jurgenson 2012), we have barely begun to understand the ways in which internet technologies, user and developer cultures, and the wider society in which they are embedded, co-construct each other. Contrary to the dreams of transhumanist “uploaders,” who sought an Apollonian, post-embodied existence as pure constructs of thought – or software – (e.g., Moravec 1988) we have not escaped the gendered body and its politics in our online spaces. Rather, software mediation can foreground body politics by providing a contested space of negotiating the transgressive, its boundaries and meanings. These papers provide a range of perspectives on the politics of the gendered body as developed in particular online environments, from representations of the physical body to avatarized constructs to the text based to a transmedia phenomenon. Each examines a discourse politics of the transgressive, detailing practices of policing normative identity expression through a mangle (Pickering 1995) of gender roles, power dynamics, software affordances and shaming systems. Collectively, they suggest an exaggerated manifestation of gender and power roles which, far from living up to the dreams of cyber-utopianism, point towards a strict policing of traditional roles.
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"""High-modernity and practical-hermeneutic approaches to identity focus on how people craft their identities through interaction, how ‘narratives of self’ are created in concert with others and out... more
"""High-modernity and practical-hermeneutic approaches to identity focus on how people craft their identities through interaction, how ‘narratives of self’ are created in concert with others and out of the diverse contextual resources within reach. This is true both off-, and online, however in the increasingly connected world, a growing amount of these discourses are digital. People spend more and more of their time online (according to comScore Canadian average was 45.3 hours; USA 38.6, UK 35.4 in Q4. 2011) and communicating in SNSs ruled people’s online time (23% in the USA), taking more than twice as much as the #2 activity (online games) in Q3 2011 according to The Nielsen Company. This chapter focuses on the way bloggers with ‘not suitable for work’ (NSFW) blogs on the micro- blogging site tumblr. reflect on their experience. More precisely, on how their blogging, online interactions, and their sense of belonging to a community inform the different narratives of self. Pleasure helps group norms and values get integrated into one’s sense of self, hence a sexuality-related, playful online community can have a significant impact. Based on in-depth interviews with NSFW bloggers, I will illustrate participants’ identity narratives in terms of their diachronic identity formation through time and space and their synchronic sense of self as it emerges in comparison to other people and in how agency is used when constructing the narrative. The different ‘We’s’ one sees oneself as a part of, as well as the juxtaposition of social and internal/psychological agency is explored. This chapter will contribute to understanding internet as a space for identity work and construction of social reality. keywords: identity; social networking sites; blogs; online communities; narratives."""
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This paper is based on visual narrative analysis of cyber-ethnographic material from a 2.5 year field-research with ‘not safe for work’ [NSFW] bloggers and self-shooters on tumblr.com. I use Koskela’s concept of ‘empowering... more
This paper is based on visual narrative analysis of cyber-ethnographic material from a 2.5 year field-research with ‘not safe for work’ [NSFW] bloggers and self-shooters on tumblr.com. I use Koskela’s concept of ‘empowering exhibitionism’, Waskul’s ‘erotic looking glass’, and Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ to analyze self-shooting (taking photos of one-self). Constricting societal norms of sexuality, body shape and body practices influence how my participants (N=20, 10 female, 9 male, 1 transgender, ages 21 - 51, average age 34) live their embodied and sexual lives. Through self-shooting and by negotiating the community specific issues of control, power and the gaze, they are able to construct a new, empowered, embodied identity for themselves.I look at self-shooting and selfie-blogging as a practice of reclaiming control over one’s embodied self AND over the body-aesthetic, thus appropriating what is and is not ‘sexy’. The NSFW self-shooting community offers a safe space oth...
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This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order... more
This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Photography, Sexuality, Social Media, and 4 moreTumblr, Selfie, Body & Society, and Selfies
This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com . By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds... more
This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com . By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds of conflicts that arise around how selfies and images are used. These are about: (a) reactions to photo-shopped images, (b) altering other people’s selfies and/or reposting them as your own, (c) misunderstandings from separating text from image (caption-stripping), (d) disrespecting the self-shooters’ way of curating their blogs. Boundary theory as well as concepts of social afterlife of content and assumed trust are used to illuminate that images, including selfies, have significant, yet different meanings to different people and play an important part in creating and maintaining meaningful relationships and communities.
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Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille.
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2020 was a pandemic year worldwide. In Estonia, it was also declared the Year of Digital Culture, by the Ministry of Culture. The synergy between the two was unexpected, but significant: the pandemic highlighted both the importance of... more
2020 was a pandemic year worldwide. In Estonia, it was also declared the Year of Digital Culture, by the Ministry of Culture. The synergy between the two was unexpected, but significant: the pandemic highlighted both the importance of digital culture and the shortcomings in its organization and accessibility, and more broadly, the shortcomings in sectoral policy-making. Estonia may be a 'digital state', but our strengths lie first and foremost in public e-government services and in the infrastructure that has been created for this purpose. We have plans to digitize our cultural heritage, but lack clear goals and actions to make culture more widely accessible through digital channels, in order to create new opportunities for participatory culture and to support the creation of innovative digital art forms that would enrich our meaning ecologies. At the same time, it is clear that most online interactions are about cultural content and that new digital technologies are being deployed primarily for more efficient consumption of creative works. For decades, researchers have shown how the creation of new technologies is shaped and driven by people's search for meaning and their everyday cultural practices. This is why Estonia needs a digital cultural policy that goes beyond both-classical cultural policy and conventional economic policy. We need an innovation policy that is attentive to culture but also technologically informed, and that sees the interconnections between culture and technology and integrates them into one whole. In moving towards this goal, we've articulated a 12-point manifesto. One statement for each month of the year of digital culture.
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This panel explores how social norms get troubled and rewritten on social media. It brings together three presentations, all of which speak to the central conference theme by engaging with how specific rules and norms regarding privacy,... more
This panel explores how social norms get troubled and rewritten on social media. It brings together three presentations, all of which speak to the central conference theme by engaging with how specific rules and norms regarding privacy, friendship, shame and commodification are appropriated, rejected or transformed. We analyze the rule breaking and rule making through social media practices like teacher-student interactions on Facebook, friendship and flirting on Tumblr, and microcelebrity attention seeking practices and self-presentation on different social networking sites. Our arguments are predicated on the well established sociological reasoning that rules for any conduct are discovered, created and sustained by social actors through their everyday practices, and become particularly visible, when broken (Garfinkel, 1967). We also rely on the thesis that different groups differ on “what behaviors are normative and which are not” (Ren et al 2010: 125), thus a specific group’s coh...
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This article analyses Estonian youth’s perceptions of their own political participation and their practices of participation on social media. We analysed 60 interviews with Estonian informants in a MYPLACE study and relied on a conceptual... more
This article analyses Estonian youth’s perceptions of their own political participation and their practices of participation on social media. We analysed 60 interviews with Estonian informants in a MYPLACE study and relied on a conceptual broadening that acknowledges the political potential of everyday. We relay on theories of standby citizenship and spiral of silence to understand signing petitions, commenting, liking and sharing politically minded content online. Based on this we suggest that young people in Estonia are interested in political issues and public opinion and their social media use represents a diversification of how citizens take part in civic matters. However, youths do not necessarily believe in the efficacy of social media in enacting political change and their reasons for not participating can be seen as indicative of a desire for both impression management and being affected by the spiral of silence.
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This chapter addresses the impossible situations, decisions, and what-if imagi- naries researchers are faced with daily, especially if undertaking qualitative and/or internet research and/or with vulnerable populations and/or on sensitive... more
This chapter addresses the impossible situations, decisions, and what-if imagi- naries researchers are faced with daily, especially if undertaking qualitative and/or internet research and/or with vulnerable populations and/or on sensitive topics. It aligns with voices arguing that standardized procedural research ethics are inad- equate, and builds on existing work in situational, practice based and feminist ethics to suggest a care based ethical practice. The key to this care based practice of research ethics lies in a particular kind of relationality. This relationality, in turn, is fed by trust, and germinates empathy. The chapter works through the concepts and the phenomena of significant relations, trust, and empathy by drawing examples from my ethnographic research with a community of people, who post (semi)naked selfies of their bodies online (constituting a qualitative, internet research study of a sensitive topic, and thus arguably with a vulnerable population). I describe some of my choices and actions that seem to have worked well to build trusting, emphatic and ethical research relationships, and finish the chapter by offering some suggestions and questions that might help those trying to practice an ethics of care.
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Contributing to the swiftly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this panel explores the geosocial and geopolitical dimensions of digital sexual cultures by zooming in on the connections between sexual practices,... more
Contributing to the swiftly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this panel explores the geosocial and geopolitical dimensions of digital sexual cultures by zooming in on the connections between sexual practices, geographic imaginaries, and locally embedded social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Building on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily by those interested in group sex (LC, est. 2018), a Swedish platform preferred by BDSM practitioners (Darkside.se, est. 2003), and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression (Alastonsuomi.com, est. 2007) we show how these platforms contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. On the one hand, these platforms operate as spatialized tools which put bodies in motion in the interest of hooking up. They function as digital compasses that allow for orientation of sexual desires in physical spaces. On the other hand, these platforms also assemble localized online plac...
This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of... more
This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Special Issue contributes specific cases and fine-grained conceptual distinctions to ongoing discussions about the ethics in data-driven research. In the second decade of the 21st century, a grand narrative is emerging that posits knowledge derived from data analytics as true, because of the objective qualities of data, their means of collection and analysis, and the sheer size of the data set. The by-product of this grand narrative is that the qualitative aspects of behavior and experience that form the data are diminished, and the human is removed from the process of analysis. This situates data science as a process of analysis performed by th...
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In this chapter we explore the potential of specific online communities as sites and tools of transition. Our analysis is based on ethnographic data from an NSFW (Not Safe for Work)2 community on the Tumblr social media site. Using... more
In this chapter we explore the potential of specific online communities as sites and tools of transition. Our analysis is based on ethnographic data from an NSFW (Not Safe for Work)2 community on the Tumblr social media site. Using selfies (photos taken of oneself by oneself, usually using a smartphone or a webcam and shared on social media), blogs, and participants’ stories as empirical material, we locate our analysis at the intersection of the youth transitions and youth culture theories.
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Link to sample chapter of the book Sex and Social Media
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Katrin Tiidenbergi raamatu "Ihu ja hingega sotsiaalmeedias, kuidas mõista sotsiaalmeediat" (2017) näidismaterjal raamatu algusest (sisukord, osa sissejuhatusest)
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Front pages and sample from the introduction of Katrin Tiidenberg's book "Selfies, why we love (and hate) them" (2018)