Based on twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this article investigates the offline circulation of digital media files in Solomon Islands. It explores how circular temporary labour migration drives the acquisition, movement and consumption of digital media, and how these media files contribute to moral controversies. Before the rapid proliferation of mobile phones in 2010, people living in rural environments had limited access to electronic media and the male village elite controlled access to this media, especially foreign movies. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are individually owned and encourage private consumption of media files. At the same time, migrants living in urban areas can easily obtain digital media files and have started integrating them into remittance networks. Access to electronic media in rural areas has exploded. Because foreign visual media are associated with urban, morally ambivalent lifestyles, this proliferation has also fuelled moral uncertainties among rural residents. This article suggests that to understand these moral controversies, and their significance in contemporary Solomon Islands, it is crucial to account for the mobility of digital media files offline and alongside the movements of temporary labourers.

January 12, 2018

In the Footsteps of Smartphone-Users Traces of a Deferred Community in Ingress and Pokémon Go

Anne Ganzert, Theresa Gielnik, Philip Hauser, Julia Ihls, Isabell Otto

Page range: 41-58

Abstract

In this article, the authors carry out conceptual and theoretical reflections on smartphone communities by closely investigating two apps: Ingress (Niantic 2012) and Pokemon Go (Niantic 2016). While the games’ narratives fabricate reasons for the players to move, it is the Smartphone - understood as an open object between technological and cultural processes - that visualizes and tracks players’ movements and that situates and reshapes the devices, the users and their surroundings. A central aspect is that the ‘augmented’ cities that become visible in the apps are based on the traces of others: other processes and technologies, as well as other players. These traces of practices and movements structure the users’ experience and shape spaces. Traces are necessarily subsequent and we therefore develop the concept of a deferred (smartphone) community and analyse its visibility within the apps. By close reading the two case studies, we examine potential “smartphone communities” in their temporal dimensions, as well as their demands and promises of participation. In order to gain a perspective that is neither adverse to new media nor celebratory of assumed participatory community phenomena, the article aims to interrogate the examples regarding their potential for individuation/ dividuation and community building/dissolution. In doing so, the games’ conditions and the impositions placed on the players are central and include notions of consent and dissent. Drawing upon approaches from community philosophy and media theory, we concentrate on the visible aspects smartphone-interfaces. The traces left by the various processes that were at work become momentarily actualized on the display, where they manifest not as a fixed community, but as a sense of communality.

January 12, 2018

Digital Mediation, Soft Cabs, and Spatial Labour

Donald N. Anderson

Page range: 59-76

Abstract

Critics of digitally mediated labour platforms (often called the “sharing” or “gig economy”) have focused on the character and extent of the control exerted by these platforms over both workers and customers, and in particular on the precarizing impact on the workers on whose labor the services depend. Less attention has been paid to the specifically spatial character of the forms of work targeted by mobile digital platforms. The production and maintenance of urban social space has always been dependent, to a large degree, on work that involves the crossing of spatial boundaries - particularly between public and private spaces, but also crossing spaces segregated by class, race, and gender. Delivery workers, cabdrivers, day labourers, home care providers, and similar boundary-crossers all perform spatial work: the work of moving between and connecting spaces physically, experientially, and through representation. Spatial work contributes to the production and reproduction of social space; it is also productive of three specific, though interrelated, products: physical movement from one place to another; the experience of this movement; and the articulation of these places, experiences, and movements with visions of society and of the social. Significantly, it is precisely such spatial work, and its products, which mobile digital platforms seek most urgently to transform. Drawing on several recent studies of “ridesharing” (or soft cab) labour platforms, I interrogate the impact of digital mediation on the actual practices involved in spatial work. I argue that the roll-out of digital labour platforms needs to be understood in terms of a struggle over the production of social space.

January 12, 2018

So ‘Hot’ Right Now Reflections on Virality and Sociality from Transnational Digital China

Jamie Coates

Page range: 77-98

Abstract

A reflection of both the intensity of sharing practices and the appeal of shared content, the term ‘viral’ is often seen as coterminous with the digital media age. In particular, social media and mobile technologies afford users the ability to create and share content that spreads in ‘infectious’ ways. These technologies have caused moral panics in recent years, particularly within heavily regulated and censored media environments such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper uses the spread of a ‘viral’ sex video among young Chinesespeaking people who live transnational lives between Japan, China, and Taiwan, to reflect upon the question of ‘viral’ media as it is conceptualised more broadly. Their position both inside and outside Sinophone mediascapes affords a useful case study to think beyond purely institutional discussions of Chinese media, and focus on the ways media practices, affects, and affordances shape patterns of content distribution. It examines the language and practices of ‘virality’ among Chinese-speaking people in Tokyo and shows how the appeal of content like the sex video ‘digital stuff’ on WeChat are typically a digital amplification of pre-existing social practice. Described in terms of ‘sociothermic affects’ (Chau 2008) such as ‘fever’ and ‘heat’ (re/huo), the infectious nature of media is imagined in different but commensurate forms of virality that precedes the digital age. In the digital age however, virality is also made scalable (Miller et al. 2016) in new ways.

January 12, 2018

Twitter in Place Examining Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Plaza through Social Media Activism

Samuel Gerald Collins

Page range: 99-122

Abstract

In Korea, social networking sites are overwhelmingly utilized through smart phones; people tweet or update Facebook with their mobile devices. Like any social networking site, this means that people are making (and remaking) connections with each other, but it also means that people are connecting in complex ways to place. Even if geo-location is disabled, these social media still have this embodied dimension; they’re not just tweets, but tweets in a particular space and time. In Seoul, embodied practices of social media infuse spaces with diverse and networked meaning that interact (however weakly) with existing spatial systems. In this essay, I explore the diverse meaning of public space in Seoul through an analysis of Twitter traffic surrounding enormous protests in 2016 at Gwanghwamun Plaza calling for the resignation of President Park Geun-hye. People who protested against the President in Gwanghwamun Plaza were not only calling for her resignation, but they are also making strong claims to space that re-define the heterogeneous site as a space of protest. At the same time, they are not the only groups making claims on the plaza: conservative groups, merchants, commuters, tourists and various bots tweet other meanings through their interactions with the protest site, and these, too, add to the networked representation of Gwanghwamun Plaza. Ultimately, the paper suggests a theory of social media in urban settings which emphasizes complex interactions of space, representation, networked action, absence and presence.

January 12, 2018

Screen Tourism

Marion Schulze

Page range: 123-142

Abstract

In the article, I discuss new forms of mobility allowed by digital practices, i. e. digital mobilities consisting in visiting geographical places from and through a screen. This discussion is based on my online ethnographic research on international fans of South Korean television series, K-Dramas. The international fandom of K-Dramas, and in a larger sense, South Korean pop cultural products - exemplified by the success of South Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012 -, is a continually growing global phenomenon that has been observed from the end of the 2000s on; a fandom that is mainly constituted through the Internet. However, instead of discussing already thoroughly researched “classic” participatory digital activities of television series fans, as blogging or writing fan fiction, I will focus on still overseen forms of mobility practices engendered by the watching of K-Dramas. My research shows that international fans of K-Dramas are highly mobile - but as much digitally as actually. They do not only travel physically to Korea to visit film locations. They also engage in digital mobilities to Korea through the mediation of desktop web mapping services like Google Maps and their South Korean equivalents, Daum and Naver. This screen screen tourism - as I call it -, then, differs in many ways from screen tourism how it is discussed in previous research on media. In describing and discussing these forms of digital mobility, special attention will be given to two dimensions: (1) the techniques fans use to find film locations, and (2) fans’ “ethno-mapping,” i. e. the methods they have created to map out film locations online.

January 12, 2018

Audiences, Aesthetics and Affordances Analysing Practices of Visual Communication on Social Media

Maria Schreiber

Page range: 143-164

Abstract

This research investigates how the practices of sharing pictures with specific audiences on social media may be related to aesthetics and affordances. Based on fieldwork (interviews, picture analysis and digital ethnography) with a group of female teenagers in Vienna, Austria, how they visually curate their accounts is mapped and reconstructed. Regarding content and aesthetics, different kinds of pictures are shared using different apps. Snapchat, for example, (for this specific group at the time of the investigation) is the preferred medium for live communication with very close friends using fast, pixelated, “ugly” pictures, while Instagram serves to share polished, conventional, “beautiful” pictures with broader audiences. Based on this case study, three conceptual arguments can be made. First, visual communication is practised in relation to specific social settings or audiences. Social media is part of these practices, and users navigate differences between platforms to manage identities and relationships. Second, the analysis of practices embedded in specific software, therefore, has to be contextualised and related to the structures of these environments. Software co-constructs processes of editing, distribution, sharing and affirmation, and its affordances have to be related to the ways in which users exploit them. Third, as visual communication becomes an intrinsic part of online communication, the exploration of how distinctions between audiences and affordances play out stylistically appears to be of particular interest, which entails calibrated aesthetics; however, this visual layer is seldom investigated closely.

January 12, 2018

Mobile Mediated Visualities An Empirical Study of Visual Practices on Instagram

Elisa Serafinelli, Mikko Villi

Page range: 165-182

Abstract

The escalation of photo sharing through social networking sites is one of the most substantial changes in mobile communication practice in recent years. The launch of smart mobile technologies represents a decisive moment in the production and observation of visualities with an elevated characteristic of digital shareability and reproducibility. Considering recent technological advancements and new social media services, this paper aims to study how social platforms and smart mobile devices are affecting individuals’ visual, social and digital practices. In particular, this paper examines the social exchange of photographs online in order to advance an in-depth reading of contemporary mobile media. The mobility afforded by smart mobile devices represents a fundamental condition that shapes the human-technology relationship. The paper studies this condition by concentrating on the dynamic mobility of individuals, devices and visual information. Methodologically, the paper employs a case study approach to analyse how Instagram affects individuals’ perception of their mediated lives. Qualitative interviews formed the fieldwork and a sample of 44 Instagram users took part in the study. Visual content analysis of participants’ photo sharing further contributed to the investigation. Findings from the study show that the use of smart mobile devices constitutes the development of new forms of mobile mediated visualities. The mobility and mediation afforded by smart mobile devices seem to establish new practices for producing and sharing images that push individuals to think visually of events, people and surroundings. These practices lead to the visual dataification of social practices and intensify the quantity and variety of visual data shared online. Within this context, the visual hyper-representation of social practices is exemplified by the current trend of giving to everything a visual justification (e. g. foodporn). In its conclusions, the paper offers a conceptual apparatus that can help to understand contemporary social, digital and visual interactions.

January 12, 2018

‘Re-appropriating’ Facebook? Web API mashups as Collective Cultural Practice

Stefan Werning

Page range: 183-204

Abstract

In contemporary debates about socio-technical implications of software, the platform metaphor, the corresponding notions of architectures and ecosystems as well as the formatting of data to afford ‘platformization’ play a central role. This approach has certainly proven fruitful to assess the role of companies like Facebook in contemporary society. However, it characteristically overlooks the messiness of actual usage practices and those studies that do acknowledge the internal power struggles that subcutaneously shape platforms often take a top-down perspective, disregarding bottom-up processes of (re-) appropriation. To address this gap, the article outlines a method to study how users and semi-professional developers collectively frame the cultural imaginary of a platform by conducting a thoroughly comparative content analysis of mashups created using the Facebook Web API. The affordances of many individual mashups might be considered marginal; yet, the tool-assistant comparison allows for inferring common patterns of interpretation that characterize mashup creation as a mobile digital practice, which plays a key role in social media platform development.

II. Entering the Field

January 12, 2018

Situating Hobby Drone Practices

Julia M. Hildebrand

Page range: 207-218

Abstract

Consumer drones are entering everyday spaces with increasing frequency and impact as more and more hobbyists use the aerial tool for recreational photography and videography. In this article, I seek to expand the common reference to drones as “unmanned aircraft systems” by conceptualising the hobby drone practice more broadly as a heterogeneous, mobile assemblage of virtual and physical practices and human and non-human actors. Drawing on initial ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with drone hobbyists as well as ongoing cyber-ethnographic research on social networking sites, this article gives an overview of how the mobile drone practice needs to be situated alongside people, things, and data in physical and virtual spheres. As drone hobbyists set out to fly their devices at a given time and place, a number of relations reaching across atmospheric (e. g. weather conditions, daylight hours, GPS availability), geographic (e. g. volumetric obstacles), mobile (e. g. flight restrictions, ground traffic), and social (e. g. bystanders) dimensions demand attention. Furthermore, when drone operators share their aerial images online, visual (e. g. live stream) and cyber-social relations (e. g. comments, scrutiny) come into play, which may similarly impact the drone practice in terms of the pilot’s performance. While drone hobbysists appear to be interested in keeping a “low profile” in the physical space, many pilots manage a comparatively “high profile” in the virtual sphere with respect to the sharing of their images. Since the recreational trend brings together elements of convergence, location-awareness, and real-time feedback, I suggest approaching consumer drones as, what Scott McQuire (2016) terms, “geomedia.” Moreover, consumer drones open up different “cybermobilities” (Adey/Bevan 2006) understood as connected movement that flows through and shapes both physical and virtual spaces simultaneously. The way that many drone hobbyists appear to navigate these different environments, sometimes at the same time, has methodological implications for ethnographic research on consumer drones. Ultimately, the assemblage-perspective brings together aviation-related and socio-cultural concerns relevant in the context of consumer drones as digital communication technology and visual production tool.

January 12, 2018

The Inchoate Field of Digital Offline A Reflection on Studying Mobile Media Practices of Digital Subalterns in India

M. Rashmi

Page range: 219-228

January 12, 2018

Mad Practices and Mobilities Bringing Voices to Digital Ethnography

Cherry Baylosis

Page range: 229-236

Abstract

There is a claim that digital media technologies can give voice to the voiceless (Alper 2017). As Couldry (2008) points out it is now commonplace for people - who have never done so before - to tell, share and exchange stories within, and through digital media. Additionally, the affordances of mobile media technologies allow people to speak, virtually anytime and anywhere, while the new internet based media sees that these processes converge to allow stories, information, ideas and discourses to circulate through communicative spaces, and into the daily lives of people (Sheller/Urry 2006). The purpose of this paper is to discuss a methodological framework that can be used to examine the extent that digital media practices can enable voice. My focus is on people ascribed the status of mental illness - people who have had an enduring history of silencing and oppression (Parr 2008). I propose theories of mobilities, and practice, to critically examine voice in practices related to digital media. In doing this, I advocate for digital ethnographic methods to engage these concepts, and to examine the potential of voice in digital mobile media. Specifically, I outline ethnographic methods involving the use of video (re)enactments of digital practices, and the use of reflective interviews to examine every day routines and movements in and around digital media (Pink 2012). I propose that observing and reflecting on such activities can generate insights into the significance these activities have in giving voice to those who are normally unheard.

January 12, 2018

An Experimental Autoethnography of Mobile Freelancing

Nadia Hakim Fernández

Page range: 237-248

Abstract

This piece discusses an experimental ongoing research that began with my experience as an academic freelancer. It focuses on my experience of moving frequently within and between cities under specific work/ life conditions. An autoethnography provides insights not observable in quantitative research designs; and allows for access to embodied experience, along with reflections on emerging topics going beyond the purely personal, namely, mobility, advantage, and (work)place-making. This strategy allowed me to delineate the boundaries of the fieldsite across online and offline settings, including the digital technologies I share with other research participants. Personal maps of geolocalised trajectories overlapped with experiential accounts (photos, audionotes, interviews, and hand-drawn maps) are included. An interpretational thickness emerges from this association of materials. The research process has inspired the development of a smartphone mobile application for documenting such experiences of mobile freelancing, yet to be created with developers, who are, in turn, participants in this research.

III. In Conversation with …

January 12, 2018

The Practice of Practice

Heather Horst, David Morley, Noel B. Salazar

Page range: 251-268

January 12, 2018

Biographical Notes

Page range: 269-272

About this journal

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory. The newly established journal provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself.

The journal is a research platform for those who are interested in the interdisciplinary field of digital media studies. It involves topics such as New Materialism, Gamification, Surveillance and Privacy, Big Data, Sensory Ethnography, Quantified Self, Extimacy, and Digital Cartography. This however, is a non-exhaustive list, and new topics will continuously supplement these themes due to the dynamic of the research field. The journal’s goal is to create a cross-disciplinary repository on the interconnection between research fields such as media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, sociology, gender studies, anthropology, game studies, media/art history and information science.