hello! we have relocated to the more officially condoned and supported online learning extravaganza space: canvas. see you there!
march 12 (last day for a while)
- safiya noble, “google search: hypervisibility as a way of rendering black girls and women invisible“
- if interested, here’s the intro to her book algorithms of oppression
- this is a pretty good podcast interview with her, if you don’t want to read (but it’s on the long side)
- ruha benjamin, engineered inequality, from race after technology
xtra special broken spring edition:
tomorrow will be the last day we’ll be able to share the same physical space together for a while, at the very least. i hope we can make use of conditions that, up until recently, we took for granted, but now seem like a special privilege. while there are “official readings” that you are more than welcome to read (i know i will!), i would like to start our class by discussing the main/most interesting/compelling/important ideas each of us has learned during the semester so far. you are free to give this thought beforehand, but there’s no need to. but come prepared to first write and then talk about it with the rest of us.
march 10
- #gamergate! if you don’t know what it is, here’s a quick overview from the time (and here is a more in-depth, feminist/sociological take on it) [[[YOU DON”T NEED TO READ THESE, BUT IF YOU”RE INTERESTED IN THE CASE, THEY ARE HERE]]]]
- kishonna gray, bertan buyukozturk, and zachary hill,
“blurring the boundaries: using gamergate to examine “real” and symbolic violence against women in contemporary gaming culture” (short!) - andrea braithwaite, “it’s about ethics in games journalism? gamergaters and geek masculinity” (also short!)
- katherine cross (she wrote the feminist overview above), “toward a formal sociology of online harassment”
march 5
- chalfen, “‘it’s only a picture’: sexting, ‘smutty’ snapshots, and felony charges” (it may be useful to see the issue in terms of “moral panics“)
- waling and pym, ‘‘C’mon, No One Wants a Dick Pic’: exploring the cultural framings of the ‘Dick Pic’ in contemporary online publics“
- hearn and hall, “this is my cheating ex-: gender and sexuality in revenge porn” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1363460718779965.
- stuff underneath this is all excess, to be ignored completely.
- [[hearn and hall have a short policy-oriented paper on the topic, you can find here, if interested]]
- [[if you’re interested in how this affects women differently than men, try this: “‘If a girl’s photo gets sent around, that’s a way bigger deal than if a guy’s photo gets sent around’: gender, sexting, and the teenage years“
march 3
- lundquist and curington, “love me tinder, love me sweet“
- fetters, “the five years that changed romance” (yes, this is not an academic article, BUT it does interview holly wood, who wrote her dissertation on the topic (but sadly has yet to publish on it). holly is also a former student who is super awesome, by the way…)
- stempfhuber and liegl, “intimacy mobilized: hook-up practices in the location-based social network grindr” (yes, 3 things is a lot to read! but this is the only standard academic article, and it does a nice job of framing this in terms of space and the actual objects, so it’s the most “digital” of the three)
extra stuff you will never read is below…
- tindr has its own sociologist! read more…
- this is not a cat influencer, but a dog influencer, so cave canem, but here’s a new interview with the owners/exploiters of “mr. bubz” (not to be confused with ‘lil bub) (how do they make money? here’s how)
- human celebrities are weird, too. “cameo is weirder than anyone expected”
feb 27
- alice marwick, “the fabulous lives of micro-celebrities“
- (if interested and have time (ha!), here is the next chapter from her book status update, “self branding” (NOT NOT NOT required!)
- zuleyka zevallos, “the sociology of unfollowing on twitter”
stop stop stop stop !!!!!!! stop stop stop stop
- marwick and boyd “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience” (at this point, you’re bored with “context collapse” but this is the key article on the topic, so i’m sharing it just in case you want to take a looksy. if you want to think about how power can force/create such a collapse, read this piece by davis & jurgenson, “context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions“)
feb 25
- boyd, “friends, friendsters, and myspace top8: writing community into being on social network sites”
- boyd, chapter 1 “identity” in it’s complicated (this link is the entire book, which is a good book, but you only should read pp29-54)
- tufecki, “who acquires friends through social media and why” (this is short!)
- wilson, “the era of antisocial social media” (this is short!)
feb 20
more self! more control! think about this (among other things): what is the relationship between this quantified self and the selfie self? is this also a performance? is it more real? (how) do they relate?
- deborah lupton (from last week’s digital sociology book, but this is the field where she is the true leader in study), the quantified self (2018)
- chapter 1 (this is a history/overview of the tech. you can skip this is you like, but it’s here as a reference in case you want/need/desire it)
- chapter 2 (chapter 2 is theory, and it is a slightly more in-depth take on things than we say in her book last week, so there’s no reason to revisit this in a new reading — so if you want a refresher, go back to that text, and i won’t even pretend there’s a chance you will read this additional stuff, so i won’t include it.)
- chapter 3
- chapter 5
feb 18
self, selfie, selfie, selfie, self.
- cambre&lavrence, “how else would you take a photo? #selfieambivalence“
- warfield, “mirrorcameraroom: the gendered multi-instabilities of the selfie” [[a slightly more straightforward version of her thinking can be found here, if you want to read. if you want to watch/listen to her give a 40minute presentation on why selfies are great, you can watch here. the operative word is “can.”]]
- kaufman, “a sociological snapshot of selfies” (this is an informal blog post, but can be useful for those new to the sociology game, in giving more insight into what’s useful about the sociological perspective)
ALSO ALSO ALSO: take a selfie and send it to me, me, me! do it before class tuesday by 1230pm. thanks thanks thanks.
BELOW THIS YOU WILL FIND EXTRA STUFF THAT YOU WILL NEVER READ IN YOUR LIFE BUT WHATEVER…
- A couple more defenses of the politics of selfies (short and not academic, a.k.a quick reads):
- saltz, the history of the selfie (art history!)
- souza et al. dawn of the selfie era (quantitative analysis!)
- selfie city — comparing selfie styles across 5 cities [lots of journalistic takes on it (like this) and a feminist critique of the project]
- smyne: “selfie: the revolutionary potential of your own face, in 7 chapters” (estimated 57 minute read!!! worth it, if you have the time (which you don’t) and the interest (which you might!)
feb 13
deborah lupton, first 2 chapters of digital sociology