Search

With the rise of the Internet in general and social media in particular, concerns about privacy and publicity have come to the fore in everyday conversation, media narratives, as well as academic research. Much of this discussion begins with the assumption that privacy and publicity are opposites forming a zero-sum trade-off: the more publicity, the less privacy, and vice versa. In this paper we demonstrate that privacy and publicity instead have a dialectical relationship, where more of both can occur at the same time. We illustrate this theoretical point by way of many empirical examples that cannot be adequately captured by binary or continuum models of privacy and publicity. As such, this paper questions an underlying conceptual assumption that informs empirical work seeking to measure privacy and publicity, especially with respect to social media. We conclude with suggestions on how to better design studies to account for this complicated relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address the how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. However, context collapse in its recent emergence has received little theoretical treatment. Here, we draw upon empirical research on social media and attempt to do just a small part of this conceptual work by first distinguishing two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse into "context collusions" and "context collisions", with the important distinction being that the former is an intentional context collapsing while the latter is unintentional. Second, in identifying the process of context collapse we must also recognize its opposite, the process by which contexts are not collapsed but reinforced through compartmentalization. To illustrate this latter point, we take the example of the smartphone application Snapchat and how its affordances counter previous social media to compartmentalize context rather than collapse it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is it that when we are given the tools to collectively produce online, when we have a chance to speak the "truth" of ourselves and to observe others, we do? Foucault precisely predicted this sort of obsession with telling the "truth" of oneself. However, this was born out of the problematic of surveillance, not the sort of celebratory mass exhibitionism we see online today. In response to this, we can frame Web 2.0, like the panopticon, as a technology of power through the knowledge production of a reoriented observational gaze. Instead of the few in a tower watching the many, we have the many watching the many online. Theoretically, this essay attempts to refine Foucault's framework. We can retain some of his work in the form of what I will describe as mass exhibitionism online, but we need a new concept of mass voyeurism, of the 'watching' we see in online socializing. Mass exhibitionism and voyeurism together highlight the gaze's more efficient working, where more is illuminated and uncovered, towards Baudrillard's usage of the term obscenity. The result is the hyper-preoccupation with the self and identity that is evident online. Now, we have a new task of reproducing ourselves online through various social networking applications, and it is Web 2.0 as a technology of wires and circuits, but also a technology of power, that allows for this explosion of new knowledge. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is about how the proliferation of new digital documentation technologies changes our experience of reality. We are documenting the world in new ways: the ubiquity of cameras, always in our pockets and ready to upload; status updates on Facebook and Twitter; geographic check-ins that document digitally our physical location; and much more. I tackle this issue by taking on four tasks. (1) I conceptualize what a digital document is and outline contemporary examples. I argue that the digital document is an atomization of life into the consumable. (2) I ask why we document and conclude that we do so in order to exist. (3) I look into how we use documentation technologies and argue that self-documentation is like a fan dance: a game of reveal and conceal. The document is always part fact and part fiction. (4) Finally, I use these insights to build an argument about how experience is changed when filtered through our constant awareness of its potential documentation. I argue that to some degree the document is not simply the reflection of experience, but instead, experience is being driven and changed by its potential documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is argued here is that McDonaldization, the theoretical concept put forth by George Ritzer, is of diminishing utility in its current form when analyzing the Internet, especially the most recent trends. The shift from a top-down, provider-generated Web 1.0 towards the bottom-up user-generated Web 2.0 is a trend towards unpredictability, incalculability, inefficiency and less subject to external control; a deMcDonaldization of the Web. These conclusions stem from an analysis of Web 2.0, such as social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace), media sharing sites (e.g., Flickr, YouTube), open source software (e.g., Linux, Firefox), Wikipedia, blogs and the blogosphere (including Twitter) and so on. It is argued here that the mechanism that allows the trend towards deMcDonaldization is the relative lack of scarcity in digital and user-generated environment as compared to the material world that the concept was created to describe. However, this argument is tempered by the fact that much of the Internet is highly rationalized. Many of the sites that allow for unpredictable user-generated content do so precisely because of their rationalized and standardized, thus McDonaldized, underlying structure. For example, Facebook, eBay and Wikipedia pages look and behave similarly for all users. Thus the conclusion is nuanced: that rationality and irrationality can comfortably coexist online, arguably due to the relative lack of scarcity. This conclusion, born out of abundance, is not possible under the McDonaldization thesis that was centered in a material world of scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]