Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media 9781501356186, 9781501356216, 9781501356209

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction to Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media Katie Warfield, Carolina Cambre, and Crystal Abidin
An Anecdote (or how not to title a book)
Origin of the book
Focus of book
Contributors and politics of the book
On the becoming of the body
Each part and summaries of chapters
1. The body mediated
2. The body politicized
3. The body felt
Conclusion
References
Part 1 The body mediated
Introduction
1 ‘Find love in Canada’: Distributed selves, abstraction, and the problem of privacy and autonomy Vincent Miller
Abstraction and the separation of information from people
Informaticization
Commodification
Depersonalization, dividuals, and data
Decontextualization: Big data
Dematerialization
The self, data, and autonomy
Extension and distributed selves
Conclusion
Notes
References
2 Embodied verification: Linking identities and bodies on NSFW Reddit Emily van der Nagel
Identity documents: Linking a person with identifying information
Twitter and Weibo: Linking an account with identity documents
Embodied verification on Reddit Gonewild: Linking an account with a body
Reconnecting, and playing with, the virtual and the material
Conclusion
References
3 #ILYSM*: Instagram as fan practice Hattie Liew
Introduction
Method
Fan practices on Instagram
Self-presentation on social media
Communicating status: The anatomy of a fan Instagram account
Drawing borders: Games on Instagram
Documenting my fandom: Instagram as archive
Conclusion
References
4 Ethan’s Golden YouTube Play Button: The evolution of a child influencer Maha Abdul Ghani and Carolina Cambre
Introduction
Children’s engagement with the commercial world
Advocates of children agency and empowerment
The celebrification and commodification of children on social media
Ethan: The child vlogger, gamer, and influencer
Analysis of Ethan Channels as a figuration
Ethan Channels as a figuration
The dimensions of the figuration
Relevance-frames
Actor-constellations
Communicative practices
Datafication and social knowledge
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part 2 The body politicized
Introduction
5 Performing visibility: Representing the Palestinian Freedom Riders through non-violent protest and visual activism Gary Bratchford
The Freedom Riders
The limitations of seeing and the pitfalls of representation
The context
Circulating images: Freedom rides and multiple witnesses
Acts of exposure and concealment
Notes
References
6 #WhoNeedsFeminism? Mapping leaky, networked affective feminist resistance Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlynn Mendes
Introduction
Leaky and creepy social media: Theorizing and researching networked feminist affectivisms
Tumblr as a ‘safe space’ for feminist activism?
#WhoNeedsFeminism?: A discursive, material, and affective analysis
The transferring of a platform vernacular: Mediating an institutional ecosystem
Conclusions
Notes
References
7 ‘Smart is the nü (boshi) sexy’: How China’s PhD women are fighting stereotypes using social media Jing Zeng
Introduction
Smart is the new sexy? Smart was always sexy!
Freedom to not love
Counter-strike of nü boshi
Nü boshi broadcasters
Conclusion
References
8 Online ajumma: Self-presentations of contemporary elderly women via digital media in Korea Jungyoun Moon and Crystal Abidin
Introduction
An economic history of ajumma
‘Digital ppal-let-ter’ as ajumma’s communal spaces
Media portrayals of ajumma
Online ajummas
Momjjang ajumma
Park Mak-rye Hal-meo-nee
Conclusion
References
Part 3 The body felt
Introduction
9 Naked and unafraid: Nudity in reclaiming witchcraft rituals Emma Quilty
Introduction
Background to this study
Methodology
#witchynipples
Ritual nudity in witchcraft
Nudity in mixed-gender spaces
Performing the sacred
Carnivals of cultural madness
Witchy carnivals
Conclusion
References
10 ‘It’s like a rush of “man” feeling’: Analysing sexuality and felt-sense in men’s digital media communications Kathleen A. Hare
Sexual sensations
Collective meaning-making
Sexual sensations and language
Pulling threads
Analysing threads
Describing threads
Thread 1: Bluelight.org
Thread 2: Partyvibe.org
Thread 3: Grasscity.com
Cross-thread 1: Gendered sexuality ideologies and bodies
Cross thread 2: The highest power
Cross thread 3: What is unspeakable …
Wrapping up
Notes
References
11 Agential hysterias: A practice approach to embodiment on social media Katrin Tiidenberg, Ane Kathrine Gammelby, and Lea Muldtofte Olsen
Introduction
Hegemonic articulations of bodies
Slut
Size
Hypochondriac
Be(com)ing body with the internet
The dialectics of socially mediated embodiment
Conclusion
Notes
References
12 Picture me naked: Embodying images on and off screen Tobias Boll
Introduction
Bodies on display(s)
Camming: Visualizing bodies and embodying images in real-time
Getting the body on screen
Losing connection, losing touch
Showing the belly
Sexting: Temporary embodiments of transsituational images
Taking (yet) a(nother) dick pic
This is (was) me, then (and now)
Conclusion: Body images, embodying images,mediated bodies
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Mediated Interfaces

We dedicate this edition of our book to Dr Katie Warfield (1978–2021), who continues to be a radiant visionary in her academic field, an inspirational scholar among colleagues and students, and a rarely encountered open minded collegial bridge-builder between diverse people and paradigms. She remains a dearly loved and cherished friend by all who had the special pleasure to know her. –Crystal Abidin and Carolina Cambre

Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media Edited by Katie Warfield, Crystal Abidin, and Carolina Cambre

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Katie Warfield, Carolina Cambre and Crystal Abidin Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Eleanor Rose | Cover image: Holiday from The Substitute series, 2007–8 © Dawn Woolley All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The authors and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Warfield, Katie, editor. | Cambre, Carolina, editor. | Abidin, Crystal, editor. Title: Mediated interfaces : the body on social media / edited by Katie Warfield, Carolina Cambre and rystal Abidin. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019053731 | ISBN 9781501356186 (hb) | ISBN 9781501356209 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501356193 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Online identities. | Internet–Social aspects. | Social media. | Human body–Social aspects. Classification: LCC HM851 .M4257 2020 | DDC 302.23/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053731 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5618-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5620-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-5619-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figuresx Acknowledgments xiii Introduction to Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media Katie Warfield, Carolina Cambre, and Crystal Abidin1 An Anecdote (or how not to title a book) 1 Origin of the book 2 Focus of book 5 Contributors and politics of the book 7 On the becoming of the body 8 Each part and summaries of chapters 10 1. The body mediated 10 2. The body politicized 11 3. The body felt 13 Conclusion 14 References 14 Part 1  The body mediated Introduction 1

19

‘Find love in Canada’: Distributed selves, abstraction, and the problem of privacy and autonomy  Vincent Miller 21 Abstraction and the separation of information from people 23 Informaticization 24 Commodification 26 Depersonalization, dividuals, and data 30 Decontextualization: Big data 34 Dematerialization 37 The self, data, and autonomy 40 Extension and distributed selves 41 Conclusion 44 Notes45 References 45

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Contents

Embodied verification: Linking identities and bodies on NSFW Reddit  Emily van der Nagel51 Identity documents: Linking a person with identifying information 53 Twitter and Weibo: Linking an account with identity documents 55 Embodied verification on Reddit Gonewild: Linking an  account with a body 57 Reconnecting, and playing with, the virtual and the material 59 Conclusion 62 References 63

3 #ILYSM*: Instagram as fan practice  Hattie Liew65 Introduction 65 Method 68 Fan practices on Instagram 69 Self-presentation on social media 69 Communicating status: The anatomy of a fan Instagram account 70 Drawing borders: Games on Instagram 72 Documenting my fandom: Instagram as archive 73 Conclusion 75 References 77 4

Ethan’s Golden YouTube Play Button: The evolution of a child influencer Maha Abdul Ghani and Carolina Cambre83 Introduction 83 Children’s engagement with the commercial world 85 Advocates of children agency and empowerment 86 The celebrification and commodification of children on social media 88 Ethan: The child vlogger, gamer, and influencer 91 Analysis of Ethan Channels as a figuration 93 Ethan Channels as a figuration 94 The dimensions of the figuration 94 Relevance-frames 95 Actor-constellations 95 Communicative practices 97 Datafication and social knowledge 101 Conclusion 103 Notes105 References 105

Contents

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Part 2  The body politicized Introduction

111

5

Performing visibility: Representing the Palestinian Freedom Riders through non-violent protest and visual activism  Gary 113 Bratchford The Freedom Riders 115 The limitations of seeing and the pitfalls of representation 116 The context 117 Circulating images: Freedom rides and multiple witnesses 121 Acts of exposure and concealment 124 Notes128 References 128

6

#WhoNeedsFeminism? Mapping leaky, networked affective feminist resistance  Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlynn Mendes131 Introduction 131 Leaky and creepy social media: Theorizing and researching networked feminist affectivisms 133 Tumblr as a ‘safe space’ for feminist activism? 136 #WhoNeedsFeminism?: A discursive, material, and affective analysis 139 The transferring of a platform vernacular: Mediating an  institutional ecosystem 144 Conclusions 151 Notes152 References 153

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‘Smart is the nü (boshi) sexy’: How China’s PhD women are fighting stereotypes using social media  Jing Zeng157 Introduction 157 Smart is the new sexy? Smart was always sexy! 158 Freedom to not love 160 Counter-strike of nü boshi 163 Nü boshi broadcasters 166 Conclusion 170 References 171

Contents

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8 Online ajumma: Self-presentations of contemporary elderly women via digital media in Korea  Jungyoun Moon and Crystal Abidin175 Introduction 175 An economic history of ajumma 176 ‘Digital ppal-let-ter’ as ajumma’s communal spaces 177 Media portrayals of ajumma 178 Online ajummas 179 Momjjang ajumma 181 Park Mak-rye Hal-meo-nee 182 Conclusion 185 References 186 Part 3  The body felt Introduction 9

Naked and unafraid: Nudity in reclaiming witchcraft rituals  Emma Quilty Introduction Background to this study Methodology #witchynipples Ritual nudity in witchcraft Nudity in mixed-gender spaces Performing the sacred Carnivals of cultural madness Witchy carnivals Conclusion References

191

193 193 194 196 197 200 200 202 205 206 208 209

10 ‘It’s like a rush of “man” feeling’: Analysing sexuality and felt-sense in men’s digital media communications  Kathleen A. Hare211 Sexual sensations 212 Collective meaning-making 213 Sexual sensations and language 214 Pulling threads 215 Analysing threads 216 Describing threads 217 Thread 1: Bluelight.org 217

Contents

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Thread 2: Partyvibe.org 219 Thread 3: Grasscity.com 220 Cross-thread 1: Gendered sexuality ideologies and bodies 222 Cross thread 2: The highest power 224 Cross thread 3: What is unspeakable … 225 Wrapping up 226 Notes227 References 227 11 Agential hysterias: A practice approach to embodiment on social media  Katrin Tiidenberg, Ane Kathrine Gammelby, and Lea Muldtofte Olsen229 Introduction 229 Hegemonic articulations of bodies 231 Slut 232 Size 232 Hypochondriac 233 Be(com)ing body with the internet 233 The dialectics of socially mediated embodiment 238 Conclusion 241 Notes242 References 243 12 Picture me naked: Embodying images on and off screen  Tobias Boll

247

Introduction 247 Bodies on display(s) 249 Camming: Visualizing bodies and embodying images in real-time 250 Getting the body on screen 252 Losing connection, losing touch 253 Showing the belly 254 Sexting: Temporary embodiments of transsituational images 257 Taking (yet) a(nother) dick pic 257 This is (was) me, then (and now) 259 Conclusion: Body images, embodying images, mediated bodies 260 Notes261 References 262 Index263

List of Figures Introduction 1–3 Images of creative thinking at AoIR 2016, Berlin, Germany

4

Chapter 3 1

Examples of profile descriptions. Modelled after actual fan accounts with 7,500 and 12,700 followers, respectively

71

Chapter 4 1

Ethan YouTuber Awards

100

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5

A portion of the separation barrier along Route 443 near Jerusalem is painted to deflect the walls function. Photographer: Amir Terkil 115 Screen grab of Huwaida Arraf conducting a pre-event press conference at the roadside prior to boarding the settler bus 119 A Freedom Rider being forcibly removed from the settler shuttle bus on 15 November 2011. Photo: ActiveStills 122 Freedom Riders aboard the settler bus. Photo by Reuters staff photographer Ammar Awad 125 Photo of the Freedom Riders from back of the bus. Photo by 126 Reuters staff photographer Ammar Awad

List of Figures

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Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Author Screen Shot Who Needs Feminism? submission. Author screenshot Who Needs Feminism? submission. Author screenshot INeedFeminism signs. Author photographs Girls I Need Feminism Signs INeedFeminsim Wall, Authors Image INeedFeminism. Author photograph

140 141 142 146 146 148 149

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4

Logo of China Single-dog Conversation Association (CSCA) Screen capture of Guoke’s Weibo post and translation Cao (2016) Last Live Show Screen captures of Zhang’s and Zhen’s live streaming channels

161 165 167 169

Chapter 9 1 2

Sketch created by Alexandra Lightfoot (2015), sourced from Facebook ­(Image used with kind permission from the artist) 198 Three witches at CloudCatcher WitchCamp, c. 2015. Photo taken by Luke Brohman (Image used with kind permission from the artist) 204

Chapter 10 1 2

The felt-sense of being cockblocked The felt-sense of being aroused

221 221

xii

List of Figures

Chapter 11 1 2 3

‘Disgust and guilt,’ a vignette of the dialectics of socially mediated embodiment ‘Tapeworms,’ a vignette of the dialectics of socially mediated embodiment ‘Preoccupied’, a vignette of the dialectics of socially mediated embodiment”

239 239 241

Acknowledgments Crystal Abidin I would like to thank and acknowledge Katie (long beans) for her leadership in spearheading our Me-diated Inter-faces panel at Social Media & Society Conference in Toronto in May 2015, and Carolina for her leadership in running our Photographic Methods workshop at the Photomedia Conference in Helsinki in March 2018. Both of you are always earnest, full of emotional intelligence, and among the most eloquent theorists I know. It is an absolute pleasure to be your friend and collaborator over the years, and a bigger privilege still to have you both among my biggest cheerleaders. Crystal would also like to extend appreciation and thanks to all the PhD and ECR contributors for entrusting us with their research, and their patience throughout our mentoring process to see this book to completion.

Carolina Cambre I would like to thank all the contributors for engaging in the process as it developed over time and for participating in the greater vision for this book. I would also like to thank all the anonymous reviewers and those who served as sounding boards, especially Dr. Gaby David, at various stages in the process. Finally, words that can fully express my gratitude at the generosity of my co-editors, Katie and Crystal, have not yet been invented. I have been deeply impacted and nourished through the open flexible and feminist process we engaged.

Katie Warfield I would like to thank my collaborators for sharing values of equality, justice, growth, patience and collaboration—all of which served us importantly in the production of this book. Crystal, thank you for all your work which I know

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Acknowledgments

went above and beyond what you had originally signed up for. You are a stoic and focused mentor, friend, and role model. CC thank you for your eagle-eyed attention to detail and for always being ready and able to help at a moment’s notice. I could not have asked for a better editorial team. I would like to thank all the contributors for their commitment to writing, editing, and proofreading this book. I would like to thank Bloomsbury for such a patient and accommodating publishing process, especially Katie Gallof, Zoe Jellicoe, Erin Duffy, and Kumeraysen Vaidhyanadhaswamy. And finally, I would like to thank Kwantlen Polytechnic for their endless emotional, financial, and moral support behind the production of this book.

Introduction to Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media Katie Warfield, Carolina Cambre, and Crystal Abidin

An Anecdote (or how not to title a book) Originally this book was to be named what it is: Mediated Interfaces, but we wanted to write it – creatively and imaginatively – as: #Me-diated (Inter)faces ‘This is so cool!’ we thought to ourselves. ‘How clever are we??’ we giggled and said.

The #Me is a common hashtag on social media signifying personal practices and images of the self and so the title signified at once our personal research interests: selfies (Cambre,  2016; Warfield,  2016a, b,  2017), self-presentation on Instagram (Abidin,  2018a, b; Leaver et  al.,  2019), hook-up apps (Cambre and David,  2016), and tumblr (Warfield,  2020), and political images of faces that circulate subversively online (Cambre,  2016). #Me also reflected some of the core themes we explore in this book: selfhood, social media, identities, the feeling, and fleshy body. The bracketed (inter), in the original title, also signified a play on mediation. Inter- derives from the Latin roots meaning ‘into the world’ or ‘into materiality’. It evokes a movement from thought, concept, or theory to matter. From idea to world. And finally, the bracketed -faces pointed to the actual fleshy face of the body: the mug, the ‘money maker’, the home of recognition, judgement, categorization, and subsequently social consideration and treatment. ‘What an awesome title!’ we thought contentedly. ‘I can’t wait to see what it looks like on a cover!’ we said.

And then our significantly more astute publisher explained that if we stuck with that title, no one would ever be able to find it. No one would enjoy it. The obscurity or our playful spelling would literally send our book into obscurity.

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Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media

There is a beautiful irony in this anecdote though. When we chose to cheekily challenge the structure of these core words in our book, when we dared to spell them differently, they became incomprehensible; the logics of search engines and algorithms would deem them uncategorizable and therefore nonsensical. The minute we started to insert functions routinely used in computing into our title words – hashtags to connect and network and brackets to isolate functions in code – was the same minute our print-based language and our message broke down the ability of probability-based and prediction-based machines to compute. And this is so often what we observe as happening when we move communication to online spaces. Meaning breaks down. Language is no longer linear. Meaning making isn’t singular; it’s networked and shared. Conventionally coded parameters for ideas, categories, and signification begin to rattle and shake because the way things happen online is incredibly complex, fast, constantly changing, nomadic, and geographically networked to a multitude of online and offline spaces. What dynamisms contribute to this complexity and to the intricacy with which we consider the body on social media? Discursive forces permeating everyday offline spaces also permeate online spaces and bodies online. Forces related to gender, race, sexuality, ability, and class – tendrils of power – thread through platform communities and cultures, under our skin and through our digital representations. Our bodies and representations are also affected by the materiality of the technologies we encounter. Material affordances entwined with sociocultural conventions shape what we say, how we see, how we self-represent. And finally, feeling and affect piggy back on materiality and are equally entangled within popular and political discourses flowing between and within online and offline spaces. It is this messy, changing, fluid reality concerning the notion of ‘being a body on social media’ that the diverse range of case studies in this book explore in different ways. The forces that thread through the mediated bodies in this book are discursive, material, and affective – and often all three at once.

Origin of the book We were first approached by Bloomsbury to write this book at the  2016 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) meeting in Berlin, Germany. At that conference we presented a panel on the mediated body where a cohort of

Introduction to Mediated Interfaces

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scholars contemplated in creative and playful ways what the socially mediated body was all about. We invited audience members to trace themselves out on brown craft paper and scribble on arms, legs, and heads key themes that crossed over the different talks. We then took colourful yarn and twine and wove the ideas on the distinct paper bodies together. Strings marking terms like ‘skin’, ‘power’, ‘flesh’, and ‘feeling’ were strung across tables connecting paper hands to paper hips in a wonderful network of ideas literally written on representations of the body. The complex crafty mess came to wonderfully summarize the crafty and complex way we come to present the multiplicities of our bodies on social media. It is also important to note that this book came about within a lineage of scholarly writing on self-imaging practices on social media, particularly

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Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media

Figures 1–3  Images of creative thinking at AoIR 2016, Berlin, Germany.

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scholarship on selfies. All three of us editors were original members of The Selfies Research Network, a collective of international researchers who came together in 2011, when the phenomenon of the selfie was taking off, and being demonized, in popular culture. Our group interests were to study the social and cultural implications of the selfie. Theresa Senft, the originator of The Selfies Research Network, and Nancy Baym, principal researcher of Microsoft Research  New England, then produced a special issue for the International Journal  of Communication Studies on selfies in  2015, as well as a free online syllabus on selfies. In response to the IJoC Special Issue on Selfies, the three editors of this book came together to produce a special issue in the journal Social Media + Society on selfies in 2016. As research continued to unfold, and academics continued to explore the phenomenon of selfies, our own work evolved in different ways beyond selfies but still fundamentally retaining and interest in the socially and digitally mediated body and the way the body becomes mediated and presented in different ways on different social media platforms online. We have worked closely with the contributors of this book since 2015 to produce this collection of case studies that provide a wide breadth of examples of the complex ways that the body becomes in and through online spaces.

Focus of book Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media is an edited collection that will broadly investigate the mediated body in social media. The book is divided into three parts, which present case studies showing different ways the body is and becomes online. The three parts of the book – (1) The body mediated, (2) The body politicized, (3) The body felt – offer classic and contemporary creative reworkings of these paradigms. We title these parts specifically to speak to forces that bring the body into being – or, in other words, we are interested in the becoming of socially mediated bodies. In the collective years of our research, we have come to be equally interested in kinds of forces that come to ‘make the body’ or ‘shape the body’ as it comes to be understood online as definitions of what a body is. The body is not only a porous material entity but also beyond flesh and the senses. Bodies can also be seen as curated, calculated, crafted, and computed entities constrained by social systems. We claim that the socially and digitally mediated body is this and more. The socially mediated body is an entanglement

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Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media

of material forces from the influences of technologies, platform designs and affordances, algorithms, and privacy settings. The socially mediated body is also entangled with discourses of power related to the various intersections that shape our body, our identity, and our sense of individual and collective selfhood (gender, race, sexuality, ability, class). And finally, the socially mediated body is also influenced by emotion, feeling, and affect, some of which are socially constructed and ‘stick’ to us (Ahmed,  2008) whether we like it or not, and others are embodied and felt as radically unique (Salamon, 2010). We consider ‘body’ not only as the locus of the senses and emotions but also as the nexus of struggle and negotiation between ‘unlearned and socially/culturally learned mechanisms of physical control’ (Atkinson, 2018: 289). In other words, the socially and digitally mediated body cannot be reduced to a simple material entity that ends at the skin. Rather, it is more productively understood as a knot in space/time proclaimed in a moment as ‘the body’ deeply  entangled with various complex material, discursive, and affective currents flowing through social media and practices of self-mediation. This book then pivots around actively understanding the implications of a socially mediated body that refuses common-sense notions that the body can be contained by the contours of the skin and links to the many lineages that see the body as existing often beyond the skin, like theories within sensory studies, phenomenological theory, and trans studies. As such, chapters address the fleshy body like how Tobias Bol describes the way he slowly crafts his flesh into what online audiences deem as ‘sexy’ on online streaming porn sites, in the understanding of the political centrality of the physical biological body. But chapters also address the body through metaphorical or virtual lenses, as Vince Miller’s chapter demonstrates by exploring the impact of how the metaphors of lightness – in descriptions of the digital body – have contributed to the lack of ‘weight’ we give to the ethics around data collecting on digital bodies. This work calls for better theorizations of online selfhood or personhood vis-à-vis a conceptualization of the body that can serve to protect individuals. Sometimes we speak of the discursive body, like Jing Zeng describes in her chapter on the negative mediated stereotypes, and counter-narratives, of women with PhDs in China, and sometimes we speak of the networked ‘sensory body’, as Kathleen Hare describes in her discussion of online forums attempting to collectively define what male arousal feels like. Our part titles implicitly hint to how we group authors around what they attend to most: materiality (The body mediated), discursivity (The body politicized),

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and affective forces (The body felt). That said, it is impossible to separate the categories because the forces that permeate the chapters often entangle and overlap with one another in intimate and affronting ways. We have divided the book into parts that show intricacies in which the body is shaped by materiality and affect, or discourse and materiality, or affect and discourse, or any other combination. Each of these sections showcase in different ways the complexity of manifold material, discursive, and affective intensities in play in the production of and dissemination of the mediated body on social media. Importantly we want to showcase that these categorizations are neither distinct nor clear. Some chapters demonstrate important ways that discourses flow through and shape the fleshy material body and conversely how offline social imperatives shape online practices in turn. Others show how digital affordances permit and limit the feelings certain bodies are permitted to have. What we see through the palimpsestic trajectory of these chapters are discursive affective instances, material affective moments, and discursive material encounters. In short, we – like other internet scholars of a similar vein (Markham, 1998; Tiidenberg and Markham, 2020) – want to show that the becomings of bodies online are not simple processes that can easily be generalized. Rather, we prefer to productively shift our attention from being online to thinking of the complex and evolving processes of becoming online-offline in multi-directional and intermixed ways.

Contributors and politics of the book When we came together to write this book, it was of utmost importance that the content of the chapters presented a wide range of geographically located case studies as well as featured scholars at different stages of their academic trajectories. As such we feature very well-known and established scholars alongside emerging scholars, some of whom are still completing their PhDs. We contacted people whose names we knew well and whose work we admired, but we also directly contacted people who unexpectedly wowed us at conferences and academic events. The case studies in these chapters feature work from Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Israel, Singapore, and the UK. The chapters also address a range of social media platforms, including BaiduBBS, Daum.net, Facebook, Instagram, KakaoTalk, reddit, Snapchat, tumblr, Twitter, WeChat, Weibo, YouTube, online live streaming porn sites, and online forums. Our chapters also address a range of intersectional populations and politics

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including gender, race, sexuality, ability, mental health, disability, religion, and age. The labour involved in working with such a wide range of authors who dedicated years of their time for thankless edits cannot be under-recognized or undervalued. We are so grateful to have worked with such a brilliant group of dedicated authors.

On the becoming of the body The subtitle of this book is The Body in Social Media. As such it is important to theorize what the body is in this publication. In this section we encapsulate an incredibly brief history of the body as conceptualized in scholarly debates and then provide a pivot towards how we theorize the body – as a nomadic fulcrum of material, discursive, and affective forces. Our theorization does not propose anything novel, but rather it provides a reorientation through extension. In this book we are less interested in theorizing ‘what the body is’ and are more interested in looking at some of the complex, situated, and fleeting ways in which the body ‘becomes’ on social media. This orientation distances us from broad ontological propositions about the body – although some are summarized below – and it moves us towards the mechanics of how the body is theorized, how the body becomes materially entangled with technologies, and how the mediated body comes to feel when knotted with different situated forces in social media spaces. We believe that former theorizations deeply inform the way the body becomes online, but the complexities of networked technologies, amidst global networks of sociality and capital, have shifted phenomenological experiences of existential categories, such as time, space, and relation. This shifting complicates notions of body becomings, and attending to this very complexity in motion informs us at once about what we accept as the body as well as broader sociocultural and digital ecologies. Operationalizing the notion of body calls for some context: What might be included in our discussions of the becoming of the body on social media? The theoretical construct of embodiment has a long interdisciplinary history. And the concept of body demands a no less interdisciplinary effort. As Atkinson (2018) laments, ‘interdisciplinary models of human science are often difficult to achieve in practice as people across said disciplines often find considerable difficult in sharing languages and modalities of knowing’ (p.  299). More specifically regarding research on embodiment, he expands:

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Rarely do these accounts adopt an interdisciplinary tone or ontological flavour … In short, there are often scarce grounds for interdisciplinary teams to conceptually meet and research on the same theoretical … playing field. Needed here are truly interdisciplinary research agendas with interdisciplinary implications. As researchers of embodiment are progressively asking interdisciplinary questions and seeking the advice of specialists in fields beyond their own knowledge boundaries, the time is beyond right to pursue existing theoretical scaffolding already buttressed by cross-disciplinary sensitivities. (p. 300)

As one of the first Western social scientists to productively theorize the body, if not the first, Norbert Elias stressed that work on bodies must not only be interdisciplinary but also necessarily be concerned with process. In a foundational piece called ‘On human beings and their emotions: A processsociological essay’ published in Theory, Culture and Society, Elias described how ‘prevailing routines of analytical isolationism’ facilitated treating the body as a topic set apart noting that: There does not seem to be any need to explore the links connecting aspects of humans perceived as body with other aspects perhaps perceived as disembodied  …  human sciences  …  tacitly work with the image of a split world … the division of sciences into natural sciences and others not concerned with nature reveals itself as a symbolic manifestation of an ontological belief – of the belief in a factually existing division of the world. (Elias, 1987: 340)

Here Elias elucidates another unique aspect of his approach in that he does not separate the notion of body from that of society but rather presents it processually as responsive to nature/culture inseparably. Indeed, in The Rediscovery of the Body, Elias shows ‘the relative empirical (let alone theoretical) ridiculousness of separating this or that aspect of the body from the experience of life, and/or the division of the innate regulation mechanisms with learned regulation mechanisms’ (Atkinson, 2018: 293). Just as we propose that the body is a temporally situated fulcrum mediating forces, so too is this book a momentary fulcrum of theories on the body. As such we attempt to hold space and voice for a variety of conceptualizations. While we are limited by space for a thorough examination of this entire history, we recognize that the body, like knowledge, manifests within specific histories of meaning making and specific sociocultural present happenings. Like guiding reins, we knot our fingers around dissimilar theoretical histories to trace a book that shows these realms of scholarship are not distinct and in conflict but rather are deeply entangled and profoundly co-relational.

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Each part and summaries of chapters 1. The body mediated The chapters in this part show both how bodies on social media are shaped by texts and how they become textual. We focus on how discourses shape how the body becomes on social media but also have things like metaphors shaped how bodies come to be treated in online spaces that spill out in unpredictable ways offline. These chapters also offer case studies pushing back to enact creative performances against discourses of power and against acts that read them as something bodies are not or do not want to be or become. This part is about textuality, but importantly it includes consideration of material and affective considerations in negotiations of textuality or when the body becomes textual/ mediated. This part begins with an extended piece by Vince Miller, which aims to frame the problem of privacy and autonomy in digital culture, not as a legal or technical problem but as a problem of ethics related to metaphors of presence. Miller argues that the digital abstraction of information has contributed to a sense of ‘absent presence’, whereby information produced by people is abstracted and subsequently devalued, and thus enabling the dilution of ethics vis-à-vis persons themselves. Miller’s in-depth and lengthy analysis suggests that this process occurs via five dominant modes of abstraction: informatization, commodification, depersonalization, decontextualization, and dematerialization. Miller argues that personal information when treated as abstract ‘data’ can be easily divorced from the person and therefore from ethical obligations associated with personhood (or selfhood), effectively allowing the removal of such information from the social sphere of ethics and morals, making it ethically ‘weightless’. Following the way that bodies become abstracted through discourses and technological treatment, Emily van der Nagel discusses how the naked body on Reddit has taken on a novel, creative, and radical mode of abstraction in which the material fleshy body is divorced from other identifying markers classically used by social institutions to count and mark bodies. In this chapter, Van der Nagel delves into different ways to identify an individual. She traces historical documents of identification marking persons, their family, property, finances, and citizenship and links the history of identity verification to political subjectivity. She shows how contemporary online verification processes, like

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Twitter, and Weibo, also use classical modes of identification focusing on political identity. She then offers a radical feminist and posthuman mode of verification used on Reddit – a process called embodied verification – in which no identity documents are needed; rather the faceless body is often used to confirm the user’s identity. This mode of bodily identification, unhinged from political identification, allows users to partake in taboo or political practices against political norms, and which otherwise may have been a risk to their reputation had the images been linked to their political identity. From individual identities to group identities, in the next chapter, Hattie Liew explores the emergence and production of fan practices in social media spaces. In this chapter Liew examines Instagram fan accounts of YouTuber Jojo Siwa (­@itsjojosiwa). The chapter shows how fans engage in a variety of presentation and interaction practices on Instagram to establish their fan identity and status, draw boundaries around their fandom, and build usercentric fan archive. Whereas much literature in social media theory shows how microcelebrities craft their brand online, this chapter contributes to studies of the emergence of online fan cultures, the evolving forms of fan communities, and object of fandoms in context of social media platforms. In the next chapter, we move from creative ways that people contest discourses to an analysis of how the visual vernaculars of YouTube shape brand identities and become deeply guided by consumer prerogatives. Using Couldry and Hepp’s (2016) adaptation of Norbert Elias’s figuration theory to analyse the video content from Ethan Gamer and Ethan channels, Carolina Cambre and Maha Abdul Ghani reveal how children’s identity and self-presentation are mediated online. Their analysis indicates that through their use of the Ethan Channels, children are triggered to participate in a space dominated by consumerist norms and values. They use this micro-sociological framework to illustrate how YouTube, as a pedagogical infrastructure for sociality online, disciplines the child vlogger to conform to the norms of YouTube vloggers in order to produce creative performers of implicit advertising.

2. The body politicized The four chapters in this part address the mediated body in relation to politics and power. These chapters foreground discussions of gender, religion, race, age, capital, and sexuality. The chapters address micro-scale politics to macro-scale analyses. The chapters feature case studies from the UK, China, and Israel and

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address technological specifics of different platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and mainstream media outlets. The aim of this part is to focus on how discourses of power thread through the production of individual and networked bodies in social media spaces. The part begins with a chapter by Gary Bratchford, who focuses on how visual activists try to unsettle the visual relations of power, in militarized zones. The chapter begins by looking at the Palestinian Freedom Riders (2011) and their tactical uses of visibility, non-violent resistance, and the potential of circulatory networks they engage to help reframe, or bring into focus, the way Israeli Authorities territorialize space whilst managing Palestinian movement and visibility. Contributing to the theme of counter-narratives and counter-actions to power, the next chapter, by Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlynn Mendes, narrates how digital space is occupied by women and girls online through photographing and the uploading of experiences of sexism and sexual violence to digital platforms like Tumblr. They suggest that this practice can be a form of loitering, where participants simultaneously take up space and speak out – actions which they argue should be interpreted as forms of resistance. Importantly these scholars trace the online affective tendrils of resistance storytelling but also share empirical evidence of offline spaces in schools and how online movements like #weneedfeminism spread discursively and materially into offline everyday pedagogical spaces. Social media resistance and counter-narratives continue in the next chapter, where Jing Zeng introduces the cultural, social, and political background of the widely existing bias against nü boshi in China. Nü boshi are women who have or are pursuing their PhD and, as Zeng explains, are discursively chastised as ‘unmarriable’ and a ‘third gender’. Zeng discusses how social media platforms, like microblog-based campaigns, and live-streaming platforms, followed by a mainstream media pick-up via reality TV and dramatic shows have come to reframe nü boshi as desirable and even sexy. Jungyoun Moon and Crystal Abidin discuss one of the most misunderstood cultural groups in Korean culture: ajummas. Roughly translated as women who are married and middle-aged, the ajummas are a stigmatized demographic in Korea. Their chapter examines the economic and sociocultural history of ajummas, how they are represented in the Korean media and culture, and how they subsequently self-present via new media technologies to create their own

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forms of expression and creativity. In mainstream media, ajummas historically have been objectified. However, their use of and re-presentation via visual selfrepresentations on social media, like YouTube, have given them the ability to narrate, to a wide audience, a diversity of subject positions.

3. The body felt In this part we share a series of chapters that focus on the felt body, the affective body, or the way emotions collectively flow and move online to shape and affect mediated bodies. The part begins with a chapter by Tobias Bol on the relations between bodies and ‘their’ images in media practices that involve images of the naked body. Bol provides details and personal narrative of using his own naked body in live streaming, personal messaging, and personal self-imaging practices. For the research Bol became a member of the online erotic webcamming community for about a year and engaged in what he calls ‘autopornogra-phy’. Using original autoethnographic research on mediated sexual interactions among gay men, he shows how physical, lived bodies and their images co-emerge and are visually, sensorially, semiotically, and materially entangled in these erotic media practices. Importantly, Bol argues and illustrates the micro ways in which different forms of embodiment emerge in different situations and with different technological interfaces. The part moves the individual experience of men’s erotica to the collective production of definitions around what constitutes embodied male arousal. In Kathleen Hare’s chapter she seeks to explore the dynamics that shape collective meaning making, by exploring men’s digital communications about their feltsense experiences of sexuality and arousal. She begins by exploring different existing theories about felt-sense, and then she turns to the empirical online spaces of three parallel digital Q&A threads that ask men to explain the bodily experience of arousal: ‘Guys: can you please describe what sexual arousal feels like?’ The threads, which are found on three different open access websites, provide a unique opportunity to analyse the felt-sense expressions within and across the threads. Through attention to storytelling, gendered language, paralanguage, GIFs, SMS language (text language), and metaphors, Hare focuses the analysis on the multiplicity of ways that sociality shapes dialogue and thus the shared production of meaning about the sensory.

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The manner in which networked interfaces shape the production of the body  – whether sensorially or materially – is covered in the next chapter by Emma Quilty, who examines how the naked body of people involved in witchcraft communities in Australia is both shaped in offline carnival spaces and differently shaped in online spaces like Facebook. The detailed ethnographic narratives of participants choosing to be ‘skyclad’ (nude) reveal and make visible in academic literature the embodied experience of witches in offline spaces like WitchCamps and carnivals. Quilty bookends the deeply detailed narrative with examples of how witches are both enabled and hindered by online spaces since these spaces allow a vernacular community space to connect between offline meet-ups but deeply restrict practices of nudity due to platform community user agreements that adopt restrictive guidelines around bodily nudity. In the final chapter of this part, Katrin Tiidenberg, Gammelby, and Lea Muldtofte Olsen provide an experimental piece that braids the stories of three bodies: an ill body, a sexual body, and a body whose pain is delegitimized. They query how bodies become in online spaces, forums, and mediated interactions. Just as our bodies become through media, they take things deeper – literally under the skin – to show how these three bodies become socially mediated and that embodiment is a practice that comes to be across a variety of contexts and modalities.

Conclusion While reading this book we encourage you to think of the chapters as intimately sliding across material, discursive, and affective threads – it is these threads that at once differentiate and distinguish the unique cases we explore but also tie and tangle all the chapters together. We hope to encourage a larger dialogue on the socially and digitally mediated body, what it is, what it means, and how it becomes online.

References Abidin, Crystal (2018a), Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online, Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. ISBN: 9781787560796.

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Abidin, Crystal and Megan Lindsay Brown, eds (2018b), Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame, Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. ISBN: 9781787567504. Ahmed, S. (2008), ‘Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the “New Materialism”’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15 (1): 23–39. Atkinson, M. (2018), ‘Elias’s Contribution to the Sociology of the Body: The Rediscovery of the Hinge’, in Jan Haut, P. Dolan, D. Reicher, and R. S. García (eds), Excitement Processes: Norbert Elias’s Unpublished Works on Sports, Leisure, Body, Culture, 287–303, Wiesbaden, GE: Springer VS. Cambre, C. (2016), ‘Becoming Anonymous: The Politics of Masking’, in Vivek Venkatesh, Juan Carlos Castro (Assistant professor of art education), Jason Edward Lewis and Jason J. Wallin (eds), Educational, Psychological and Behavioural Considerations in Niche Online Communities, 297–321. Cambre, M. C. and G. David (2016), ‘Screened Intimacies: Tinder and the Swipe Logic’, Social Media + Society, April–June, 2(2): 1–11. Couldry, N. and A. Hepp (2016), The Mediated Construction of Reality, Cambridge: Polity Press. Elias, N. (1987), ‘On Human Beings and Their Emotions: A Process-Sociological Essay’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4 (2): 339–361. Leaver, T., T. Highfield, and C. Abidin (December 2019), Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures. Hoboken: Wiley Press. Markham, A. (1998), Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space, Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press. Salamon, G. (2010), Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, New York: Columbia University Press. Tiidenberg, K. and A. Markham, eds (2020), Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity, Bern: Peter Lang. Warfield, K., C. Abidin, and M. C. Cambre (2016a), ‘Introduction to the Social Media + Society Special Issue on Selfies: Me-Diated Inter-Faces’, Social Media + Society, 2 (2): 1–5. Warfield, K. (2016b), ‘Making the Cut: An Agential Realist Examination of Selfies and Touch’, Social Media + Society, 1 (4): 1–10. Warfield, K. (2017), ‘“I Set the Camera on the Handle of My Dresser”: Re-matterializing Social Media Visual Methods Through a Case Study of Selfies’, Media and Communication, 5 (4): 65–74. Warfield, K. (2020), ‘Trans-Constituting Place Online’, in Kat Tiidenberg and Annette Markham (eds), Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity. Bern: Peter Lang.

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Part One

The body mediated

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Introduction

The first part of this book is titled ‘The body mediated’. In fact, all the chapters in this book are about mediated bodies, but there is something particularly curious and creative about the manner in which the body is mediated in these chapters. Rather than focusing on what happens to the material body when it is mediated – something we will explore later in the book – this part looks at what happens when our conception of the classic fleshy and material body is made, by the forces of mediation, to be something other than or more than simply flesh. This part is about the matter of the body but also how the body comes to matter. For instance, Chapter  1 is an extended piece by Vince Miller. The purpose of this deeply theoretical contribution is to encourage us to think about the ways in which mediated bodies become of less values than our offline material selves through the powerful forces of discourses via the evolution of technological phenomena. In the chapter, Miller discusses what effects mediation has on our treatment – conceptually – of the material body, the ethical body, the political body. He takes as his focus the theme of privacy and discusses how various forms of and manifestations of ‘abstraction’ have contributed to our loss and reworking of privacy in the digital age such that the way we come to think about the body has come to be virtually weightless and thus devoid of moral and ethical value and concern. In Chapter 2, Emily van der Nagel pivots from theoretical to material to consider what happens when the material body – and not classic modes of citizenship – becomes the means by which identity is both verified and obscured in order to permit online bodies to perform non-normative acts. Here the body, which classically was aligned with other modes of identity making, is cut away from, separated from, ‘named’ identity markers, and in that act the material body provides a sort of freedom to act outside the confines of social norms and socially regulated identities. In Chapter 3, Hattie Liew shows how bodies become mediated collectively as ‘fans’. Through platform specifics but also networked vernacular practices, individual

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networked bodies come to move as one and define the practices and codes of the shared community. Importantly these practices are co-produced, dialogic, and iterative, folding in on one another such that the cooperative of unique individuals also works diligently and creatively to craft a unique and singular collective distinctiveness. Chapter  4, by Carolina Cambre and Maha Abdul Ghani, examines the celebrification and commodification of children’s bodies via the process of becoming a YouTube celebrity. What is most interesting about all of these chapters is the manner in which we can observe socially mediated forces flowing through bodies to relationally produce individuals, identities, discourses, and communities.

1

‘Find love in Canada’: Distributed selves, abstraction, and the problem of privacy and autonomy Vincent Miller

In April 2013, Rehtaeh Parsons, a teenager in Nova Scotia, Canada, committed suicide after a more-than-a-year-long struggle with depression and online bullying. The previous year she had been sexually assaulted by three boys while drinking at a small party. To make matters worse, one of the boys took a photograph of the incident on his phone and this was circulated to others at her school and into the community, where it ‘went viral’. The spread of this photo prompted a year of abuse and harassment online and offline, resulting in school changes, family moves, a stint in a mental health unit, and, ultimately, the taking of her own life. Perhaps even more astonishingly, a number of weeks after her death, digital images of Miss Parsons once again became the subject of controversy when advertisements for the Ionechat dating website, featuring photographs of the deceased girl (at the age of  15), appeared on Facebook with the caption ‘Find Love in Canada! Meet Canadian girls and women for friendship, dating or relationships. Sign up now!’ Twice, this girl had been the victim of an Internet culture of free-floating images and information. When it was first discovered that images of Rehtaeh were being used in dating advertisements, it was speculated that these dating ads with her image were a tasteless gimmick to draw attention and more hits to the Ionechat website. However, the reality was more mundane, the result of the common practice of ‘image scraping’ or ‘data scraping’, where software indiscriminately grabs pictures on the Internet given a set of search criteria for use in advertisements and on websites. An Ionechat website administrator was quoted as saying: ‘I simply used a tool to scrape images randomly on Google Images and inserted it into the ad campaign … I sincerely apologize’.

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This practice is widespread, even though it is problematic in terms of copyright and privacy legislation. The person responsible for the ad merely uploaded a decontextualized image of a girl for a dating ad. He had no idea who this girl was and what her story might have been. The image of the girl had been completely separated from the characteristics of the person it represented. Three things stand out here: ●●

●●

●●

The separation of the meaning of the photo of the girl from the girl herself. In that respect, the image has been washed of meaning transformed into ‘data’ to create value – a kind of social abstraction. The role of machines (image scrapers, phones) in this process – a kind of technical abstraction. The demonstration of the distribution of self digitally into networks.

Based on these, this chapter considers the uneasy relationships between what is viewed as human rights to privacy and the connected nature of social life in contemporary digital culture. Rateah Parsons’ privacy was grossly invaded on two occasions. First, when graphic footage of her assault was taken without her permission and spread among and beyond her peers; and second, when her image was used, without her permission, in a commercial manner and in grossly inappropriate circumstances. Parsons had no control over her image, over its abusive capture and distribution, or over the proliferation of media images of her after death, given their location in image banks worldwide. If a ‘crisis of presence’ exists in contemporary culture, one of its clearest manifestations can be seen in terms of issues around privacy and autonomy.1 My aim is to frame the problem of privacy and autonomy in digital culture, not as a legal or technical problem but as a problem of ethics related to presence – in this case the ethics of an absent presence resulting from the abstraction of information generated from persons. I begin by positing that the notion of abstraction is at the heart of issues around privacy and autonomy in digital culture. I am going to suggest that contemporary digital culture consists of five modes of abstraction: informatization, commodification, depersonalization, decontextualization, and dematerialization. I argue that personal information when treated as abstract ‘data’ can be easily divorced from the person and therefore from ethical obligations associated with personhood, effectively allowing the removal of such information from the social sphere of ethics and morals, making it ethically ‘weightless’.

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Secondly, I suggest that when addressing the problem of privacy more productively it is worthwhile considering not only privacy and what rights humans have to a private life but also what it means to be ‘human’ in an era of digital communications and networked environments. Being-in-the-world now often involves the spreading of our presence into a myriad of places and how the increasing virtualization of social life has extracted (and abstracted) our presence and our very being into bits of data which are free-floating: both beyond our control or even our awareness. As a result, the second section will examine what it is to be a ‘self ’ in online culture through Rotman’s (2008) concept of the parallel or quantum self, as well as Stiegler’s (1998) concept of exteriorization. I conclude by suggesting that new consideration needs to be given towards digital or immaterial components of self (i.e. personal data) as matter of being or part of the self, not as ‘representational of ’ or ‘information about’ persons. Such a shift in thinking is necessary to give personal data ‘ethical weight’ and thus maintain any prospect of privacy and autonomy.

Abstraction and the separation of information from people To be abstract is to consider something theoretically. One can think in abstract terms or deal with abstract matters, meaning that one is engaged in the realm of ideas, and not dealing with concrete matters or events. Abstraction also refers to the removal or withdrawal of something from its setting or context. Indeed, the Latin root of abstraction (abstrahere) means ‘to draw away’ (OED). In computing science, abstraction refers to reductive processes of removing all but  the relevant characteristics of an object for the task at hand with the usual goal of reducing complexity and enhancing efficiency. The ‘abstraction’ at the end of such a process of reduction is a representational object consisting of the relevant qualities of the original, with all irrelevant information withdrawn. It is my contention that the notion of abstraction is at the heart of issues around privacy and autonomy in digital culture. In what follows, I am going to suggest that contemporary digital culture consists of five modes of abstraction: informatization, commodification, depersonalization, decontextualization, and dematerialization. Three of these (commodification, depersonalization, dematerialization) can be considered more ‘social’ forms

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of abstraction, having their roots more in the machinations of contemporary capitalism, while two (informatization and decontextualization) can be seen as more ‘technically driven’ forms of abstraction. I posit that all these modes of abstraction combine to create a distance between information about people and the people themselves, and that this works to remove data from any sense of meaning in terms of the social and thus any moral or ethical responsibilities shown to others. Personal information gets transformed into valuable ‘data’, which opens it up to all forms of economic, instrumental, and exploitative use, discouraging ethical links to real persons and their rights to privacy and autonomy.

Informaticization The formulation emphasizes the reification that information undergoes in the Shannon-Weiner theory. Stripped of context, it becomes a mathematical quantity, weightless as sunshine, moving in a rarefied realm of pure probability, not tied down to bodies or material instantiations. The price it pays for this universality is its divorce from representation (Hayles, 1999: 56). Claude Shannon is often called the (reluctant) ‘father of the digital age’ (Waldrop,  2001). Through the publication of his  1948 paper ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, he is largely responsible for what is referred to as ‘information theory’, upon which almost all modern electronic communication is based, and it is still considered one of the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. Shannon was confronted by the need to formulate a model of communication to facilitate the design of technologies that would reliably transfer signals and messages across a variety of media and conduits (such as telephone wires or satellites) at large volumes. Shannon recognized that the properties of information could not change from one medium or context to the next; otherwise the reliability of that information getting from one place to another could be compromised. Shannon approached this by redefining ‘information’, not as a symbol or mark which carries ‘meaning’ or ‘content’ (the conventional way we think about information) but as a ‘probability function’, essentially an expression of the likelihood of the occurrence of a particular set or sequence of symbols as opposed to another alternative set. In the words of Warren Weaver (1949), who popularized Shannon’s work:

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To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message … a logarithm of the number of choices. (4)

As such, information is reduced to a mathematical object of probability produced through a narrowing down of a series of ‘choices’ of what a message is, or not, out of a range of possible messages or message elements. For Shannon (1948), the technical problem of the accurate transmission of symbols outweighed the semantic problem of whether the transmission conveys the desired meaning. Thus, the issue of ‘meaning’ took a back seat to the problem of ‘reliability’. Conceiving information in this way allows circuits to handle greater volumes and variety of messages; however, by giving information a definition which reduces everything it sends to the same value, the concept of information, at the very foundations of digital culture at least, becomes divorced from meaning, context, and materiality (Hayles, 1999; Roszak, 1994; Thacker, 2003). According to Hayles and Roszak, the implications for contemporary culture are quite profound. Hayles suggests that this shift illustrates the foundations of ‘how information lost its body’. The story of the redefining of ‘information’ from something meaningful and contextual, a useful fact about a particular thing, to a decontextualized mathematical quantity (essentially the transformation from information to data) becomes the story of the separation of information from matter, context or meaning as the technical basis for digital culture (Thacker, 2003). Roszak suggests: For the information theorist, it does not matter whether we are transmitting a fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are ‘information’. The word comes to have vast generality, but at a price; the meaning of things communicated comes to be levelled, and so too the value. (1994: 14)

Distinctions between communications – what is public or private, what is right or wrong, what is personal or impersonal – are lost in this quantitative understanding of information. Such decontextualization erases the distinction between what ought and ought not to be communicated. Human meanings, human standards, human ethics become more difficult to apply in such an informational landscape, which makes little or no acknowledgement of the character of what is being communicated.

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Commodification For Marx, ‘an abstraction is made every day in the social processes of production’ (Marx and Engels, 1987: 272; cited in Prodnik, 2012: 277). The commodification of labour is chiefly accomplished through its abstraction, wherein, under the market process, the bodies, labour, talents, and abilities of individuals become commodified as market relations, which come to define all social relations in society. Labour becomes abstract when it is removed from the realm of the concrete (where labour is conceived of as a useful activity for creating things which have use values) into something that can be rationalistically measured and calculated. For example, one can see this in conceiving of labour cost in terms of dollars per hour. This abstraction reduces all forms of labour, unequal as they may be, into an equivalent objective measure, which allows one to think abstractly about human work, separating it from the worker him(her)self. Such abstraction allows a ‘labour market’ to function in a context independently of the social relations of the workers themselves. This abstraction becomes articulated in the process of ‘commodity fetishism’, where the social relations of the products of human labour are manifested in our perception only in terms of the exchange value of the objects themselves, while the concrete relations behind their production are hidden. The object itself is abstracted from the human labour that produced it so that the conditions of its production no longer matter. The process of reification is the other side of this coin, wherein, under the market process, the bodies, labour, talents, and abilities of individuals become commodified as market relations come to define all social relations in society. Viewed through the lens of commodification, human qualities, and humans themselves, take on the character of ‘things’ which can be bought and sold objectively on the market. And this ‘thingness’ becomes the primary way in which people relate to and perceive each other. Humans are reduced to the personification of the characteristics of the objects they own or are reduced in their value to what they or their talents are worth in terms of market value. As Lukács (1972: 100, cited in Stahl, 2013) suggests, the commodity form [s]tamps its input upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of ’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without them being subjected increasingly to these reifying processes.

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In other words, human endeavour, its products and ultimately humans themselves are withdrawn from their situatedness within social relations, which includes subjective aspects of meaning, ethics, and morality. Instead, they are seen in terms of objective market circumstances: in terms of their value, or the value of their work, on the open market. Their labour is divorced from their being: no longer seen as meaningful practices, but merely as quantifiable in market terms. As Fuchs (2010, 2012) and Rey (2012) point out, the interesting thing about digital capitalism is how that commodification process has been applied not only to ‘labour’ in the sense of paid work but how the advent of user-generated content and social media associated with Web  2.0 has been able to abstract ‘existence’ itself, in terms of leisure, communication, and the simple ‘doing’ of life online into commodity production through processes of data collection. Even time outside of paid work now produces marketable commodities extracted from their human origins in the form of personal data and insights into human behaviour. This shift has been accomplished because information in itself has achieved a great deal of commodity value in the contemporary economy in two ways: first, as a means of efficiency in the production and circulation of goods (which become more profitable); and second, as a means of communication with which to gain insight into (and increase) the consumption of goods by finding out more about the people doing the consuming. The rise of information value as a means of consumer insight, in particular, has led to the explosion of growth in the industry of collecting personal data for marketing purposes. Every action which takes place on the web – every purchase, every search, every website viewed, every message, and every game played – leaves a digital shadow, trace, data trail, footprint, or record of that action. Thus, all consumer and nonconsumer activities can be collected, analysed, and used to provide insight into the behaviour of consumers as individuals and as larger-scale market segments or niches (Zwick and Knott, 2009). Such an observation is nothing new and was certainly not lost on early Internet observers such as Dawson and Foster (1998), who suggested that marketing potential was behind the adoption and development of the Internet by business in the early 1990s. As a result, one can argue that the web essentially exists as we know it today (a place where the ability to communicate with each other is largely free for anyone) not as a communication medium but more fundamentally as a way to observe people’s behaviours and to collect, sell and

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use all the information possible about them so that valuable insights about what they would like to buy can be gained. This is why Google could be worth almost 400 billion USD in 2013 with only 55,000 employees, and Facebook can be worth just under 200 billion USD with only 8,348 employees.2 Their value is based on the information they collect about people and the marketing potential that revenue holds, not on the fact that their customers can use most of their products and services for free. Aside from these high-profile companies, there is an entire data brokerage industry which, while pervasive in its effects and tenacious in its acquisition of personal data, lies largely unnoticed by the public and largely unregulated by governments. This industry, worth $300 billion per year (Roderick,  2014), compiles data collected by governments and private organizations, both online and offline, and then organizes and packages this data for sale to marketers, credit card companies, individuals, and even nefarious cold-calling and ‘direct marketing’ companies. Such lists offer aggregated data and individual profiles based on thousands of data points gleaned from sources such as government records, mortgage applications, health records, transactions, and purchase data and social media. In the United States and the European Union, this lucrative trade goes largely unregulated. Companies refuse to disclose data sources, and consumers  have  few rights to discover what data has been compiled about them (even if it is wrong). The sale of this data is also minimally restricted (Roderick,  2014). As a result, data brokerage firms are seen as particularly invasive in terms of privacy and exploitative in terms of data. Perhaps more than any other, this industry demonstrates how the collection and use of such data holds real-world consequences for the people whose data is held. Social and economic sorting is conducted in terms of who is a worthwhile versus a nonworthwhile customer: who is a financial risk, which customers are potentially vulnerable to predatory financial practices, or who might be interested in a variety of health remedies. The industry displays a willingness to use personal data as a kind of disciplinary power to secure capitalist markets at the expense of (often vulnerable) consumers (Roderick,  2014). For example, in  2013 a US congressional hearing on the data broker industry heard that a ‘rape sufferers list’ was for sale by a company called MFDbase200, as well as lists for alcoholics, AIDS sufferers, and lists of persons who are late on payments (Hill, 2013). In the UK, the uncovering of data brokers selling pension details and medical

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records of millions to cold-calling marketing companies caused concern over the potential targeting of vulnerable older people (Faulkner et al., 2014a, b). The events surrounding the  2012 Edward Snowden affair, where he revealed  the  extent to which the American NSA was collecting vast amounts of data  about its own populace and others, magnified the debate about data collection in relation to surveillance and the development of a ‘big brother’ state. More concerning perhaps was the revelation of the extent of complicity of large commercial organizations such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Microsoft with the NSA’s Prism project, in granting access to content and metadata from hundreds of thousands of their customer accounts (Mackaskill and Dance, 2013). Governments legislate all communication companies to retain interactional data through data retention acts, allowing government access to private data in criminal and security investigations. At the same time, governments also sell citizens data to data collection brokers while refusing to legislate the data brokerage industry to any extensive degree. It is worth pointing out that the value of personal data is the impetus for an ever-increasing number of strategies to extract this information from us and thus the ever-increasing amount of services we enjoy as Internet users. The digital environment itself exists largely to collect data. In this respect, our presence online is manifest through the data we produce. As Galloway (2012) suggests, we have an informatic presence which is open to different forms of analysis and simulation: To be informatically present to the world, to experience the pleasure of the computer, one must be a sadist. The penalties and rewards are clear. In contrast to the cinema, in order to be in relation with the world informatically, one must erase the world, subjecting it to various forms of manipulation, pre-emption, modelling and synthetic transformation. (Galloway, 2012: 13)

Galloway is both noting the extent to which digital culture brings us out of the world and towards abstraction and that the price of online existence is an abstraction of oneself, as one is transformed into various data, models, simulations, profiles to be manipulated by others for their own utility. Zwick and Knott make a similar point but relate this dematerialization more directly to the exercise of power: Once consumption has been dematerialized and been made available as coded, standardized, manipulable data, there are no more limits to the construction of difference, to classification, and to social sorting. (2009: 222)

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Profiling, especially of vulnerable members of society, through the data collection and analysis of data brokers and the selling of that data onwards, demonstrates how power is tilted heavily in favour of those human and non-human agents who collect and possess data. Those on the receiving end of such abstraction in terms of classifications and sorting procedures have little knowledge of what is known about them, how such information is gathered, how or where it is disseminated, and how the application of such knowledge impacts them. Thus, on the Internet, we are always already abstracted. Our digital presence, by its nature, is reduced to calculative bits where subjective meaning has been stripped away by the technology itself. The link between the qualities of a person and the person itself has already been severed as the body of our digital existence is endlessly and ceaselessly abstracted and commodified through the endemic data collection technologies continually monitoring our net presence. Just as in the commodification of labour, where abstraction is the key mechanism to creating a labour market which can be viewed calculatively and outside human terms, the abstraction of personal information allows a withdrawal of information from its origins in the person. When people (and the information they produce by existing online) become abstracted and treated as simple commodities which can be bought and sold in a weightless, free-flowing culture of digital capitalism, they are no longer valued as human beings in their own right. Instead they ‘become independent, quantifiable, non-relational features which must remain alien to any subjective meaning that one could attach to them’. The separation between the information about a person and the person oneself through the abstraction process of commodity formation also separates that information from the social sphere of personhood which includes mutual responsibility, ethical, and moral behaviours. Instead, data abstracted from persons and social relations is left open to instrumental use, operations of coercive power and outright exploitation. By design, such a situation cannot respect rights to privacy or individual autonomy.

Depersonalization, dividuals, and data The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/ individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals’, and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’ (Deleuze, 1992: 5).

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The notion of the self as an independent, rational, self-contained, autonomous entity may be an abstract concept based on Western metaphysical philosophical legacies, but it is also the notion on which we base the concept of human rights, including the right to autonomy and to privacy. Foucault suggested that this individual in modern societies was the target of discipline and disciplinary strategies. As such, the ‘individual’ or ‘subject’ is the effect of the relations of power, which include disciplinary strategies that regulate the behaviour of the social body in terms of space, time, and behaviour and through the techniques of observation, normalizing judgement, and examination. Early on, Poster (1995) made the point that computerized databases were a form of discourse in the Foucauldian sense in that they constitute individual subjects by ‘rules of formation’ (Aas, 2004). They become the raw material to categorize individuals in a multitude of ways, and in that sense, databases are ‘a discourse of pure writing that directly amplifies the power of its owner’ (Poster, 1995: 85). Such power can manifest in various ways, from the abstraction of one’s online existence into a form of commodity for which one is not economically compensated, as in the informational labour of Fuchs (2012), to the unknown algorithmic shaping of one’s online searching experience in the name of ‘personalization’, as in Pariser’s (2011) ‘filter bubbles’. It could involve being given a bad credit rating on the basis of algorithmic judgements and information which is unknown to the applicant or suffering continual ‘cold callers’ in one’s own home and even coercion into exploitative sub-prime mortgages (Rivera et al., 2008; Roderick, 2014). Deleuze (1992), in his commentary ‘Postscript on societies of control’, suggested that with the advent of new technologies, we have shifted from a society of disciplined individuals to a society based on the control of what he calls ‘dividuals’. Dividual can be defined as ‘a subject endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via modern technologies’ (Williams,  2005: n/p). Such data representations can easily be seen in the myriad of data collected about us through monitoring of our surfing habits, search preferences, purchase histories, and the many forms of personalization technologies mentioned by Pariser (2011). The dividual refers to the profiles, types, and niche markets in which individuals are categorized. Thus, dividuals sit between the distinction of ‘individual’ and ‘mass’. A dividual is not a discrete self, but something which is made up of aggregates of features of discrete selves. Endlessly divided and subdivided, they are a series of features removed from an individual self, placed within aggregates, and reconfigured according to various criteria of interest by whatever body has access to the data. For example, when Amazon recommends books based on

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your previous purchases and browsing tendencies, it is combining your data with  others with similar purchasing and browsing histories in order to suggest future purchases. Its suggestions are based on you and others (who showed an interest in similar books). It is addressing you as an individual but is working at the level of a dividual. Williams (2005), therefore, sees two facets to dividuality: the segregation of physical selves from their representations as data3 and the loss of the distinctiveness or ‘aura’ by such a separation of selves from what is being used to represent such selves. Lack of presence makes dividuals possible, since the lack of a physical body necessarily leads to an abstracted reduction of the self into data points such as ‘interests’ or browsing behaviour. Such data points are endlessly divisible, and form the basis for our classification into useful or profitable data categories. These make up the simulational ‘data doubles’, which not only attempt to predict affinities and behaviour but are also the entities enacted upon by data analysis such as marketers or government agencies. In an era of endemic data collection (‘big data’), the construction is not an individual one but a dividual one: the result of aggregated data removed from its individual, distinctive source. Thus, government surveillance, for example, deflects claims of invasions of privacy by referring to data collection being at the ‘metadata’ level. Private corporations regard data as ‘depersonalized’ and thus not attributable to individual persons, and therefore not an invasion of privacy. Those worried about privacy are assured that, in the case of government security surveillance, the content of any transaction (e.g. mobile phone conversations) is not collected, merely the metadata of the number called and the time, duration, and location of the call (Amoore, 2014). Similarly, net users are assured that commercial organizations gathering ‘big data’ do not collect ‘personally identifiable’ information and that the examination of such information is automated. The person barely figures within contemporary data collection and surveillance. Amoore (2014) points this out when she suggests that contemporary forms of security and data collection do not primarily seek out complete sets of individual persons but assemble sufficient sets of data points at an aggregate level to make inferences. So, for governments and commercial enterprises, the depersonalization of data becomes an effective ‘workaround’ of the issue of privacy rights, creating leeway for organizations to take whatever information they want from individuals, without their permission. This move circumvents the notion that big data collection can be an invasion of privacy

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because such data is not directly tied to an individual, which possesses rights, but to a dividual, which does not. With these strategies, the ‘person’ appears less as a singular, coherent body than as a plural set of variables, disaggregated and reassembled with others while still possessing an onward life which can have consequences for individuals (Amoore, 2014: 110). However, their separation from any identifiable subject releases them from ethical or legal obligations and ethical weight. For the individual who is both the subject of privacy rights and the data subject of data protection laws, contemporary security appears indifferent for the person as such, while attentive to the multiple links and associations among plural people and things … put simply, contemporary forms of security are less interested in who a suspect is than what a future subject might become. (Amoore, 2014: 109) But suggestions of anonymity are flawed because if such data were not attributable back to identifiable persons, it would be practically useless for security agencies in the apprehension of suspected terrorist plotters. A growing body of research demonstrates that even with anonymization and encryption the reverse engineering of depersonalized big data back to individual, identifiable persons is entirely possible (see Backstrom et al., 2007; de Montjoye et  al.,  2013; Narayanan and Shmatikov,  2008; Su et  al.,  2017; Ward, 2013). For example, German researchers found that it took as few as ten crossreferenced web addresses in anonymized web browsing data to identify the locations of specific people, and thereby uncover their identities. Through this method, they uncovered the pornography preferences of a German judge and the drug preferences of a German Member of Parliament (Ward,  2017). Similarly, Su et  al. (2017) demonstrated that it is even possible to connect publicly available data of web browsing histories to the social media profiles of specific individuals. While it is counterintuitive to suggest that the depersonalization of data leads to invasions of privacy and a lack of autonomy, if depersonalization is technically flawed, what the supposed ‘depersonalization’ of data does accomplish is a legitimation for increasing amounts of data collection through a falsification that such depersonalized processes do not affect individuals from whom data has been taken or abstracted. Again, personal data is allowed to more readily be considered apart from the human origin of that data, freeing it from moral and ethical responsibilities, including privacy.

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Decontextualization: Big data The endemic and rampant collection of data on individuals and dividuals becomes even more problematic given the current technological advances around ‘big data’. ‘Big data’, a buzzword in contemporary technological discussion,  refers to the increasing ability to collect, store, and analyse very large datasets, from a variety of sources. Volume, variety, and complexity make ‘big data’ sets impossible to analyse with previous generations of data management tools and processing applications. However, recent advances in cloud computing, parallel processing, and storage capacity now mean that the analysis of extremely large datasets is possible, ushering in a new emphasis on the economic importance of data. The new social analysis made possible through big data is one without theory. It is the kind of social physics (Wyly, 2014) born from and driven by the endemic collection of data retrieved by CCTV, retail purchase records, the use of digital devices, the logging of digital interactions, click-through data on webpages and Internet ads, the scanning of machine-readable objects such as passports, travel cards, RFID and bar codes, sensors and ambient intelligence, and, of course, social media (Kitchin, 2014: 2). As Anderson (2008) suggests, this potentially creates a new scientific and certainly social scientific paradigm: It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later… this is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of  human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is that they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. (n/p)

Innovations associated with the term ‘big data’ enable a new kind of utopian thinking when it comes to analysing (and more importantly from this perspective, predicting) the social world. Indeed, the kind of data-led revolution advocated by writers such as Anderson (2008) and Prensky (2009) is one in which explanation, contextualization, or understanding is deemed irrelevant. What is instead said to be relevant are the correlations between phenomena. The ‘numbers speaking for themselves’ belies a radical pragmatism in which the pursuit of data to find correlation becomes the sole aim of the inquiry. As Anderson points out, Google, the most prominent big data practitioner, functions on the basis of correlation, not knowledge. Google Translate does

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not ‘understand’ the languages it translates or how the languages it translates even work. It does not know why one banner ad is more successful than another or why one page is more popular than another. ‘Google Flu Trends’, a service which uses social media data to predict flu outbreaks, does not know how the flu is spread. Correlation, successful prediction, and/or usability are the only explanations Google is interested in and the only contextualization they need. Embedded in this logic is the premise that the more data collected, the more accurate and fine-grained the analysis, and thus the more accurately things can be predicted. There is an implicit justification for increasing the amount of data collected at all levels in that the more data that can be analysed, the more uses will emerge from its mining. The paradigm of big data demands ever more data to fulfil its utopian vision of usefulness and predictability. The big data paradigm has been critiqued on several fronts: boyd and Crawford (2012) point out methodological problems in terms of the lack of objectivity and accuracy of big data, or at least that such factors are often not even considered in big data analysis. They suggest that inherent bias in the use of social media data and the inaccuracies involved in using very large datasets means that it is very difficult to make claims for the quality of the data used. Golder and Macy (2014) similarly suggest that there is a danger of floods of low-quality research being generated from big data mining and the tendency among big data enthusiasts to overgeneralize by thinking that a large population of, say, Facebook users and what they talk about online is equivalent to the entire offline world. Such methodological concerns of ‘Big Data Hubris’ were backed up in  2013, when it was revealed that one of the early show-pieces of big data, Google Flu Trends, had in the past demonstrated greater accuracy in medical visits resulting from the flu than the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the whole project was suspended after it began predicting more than double the amount of doctor visits in the United States than was eventually reported (Lazer et al., 2014). Boyd and Crawford (2012), Lyon (2014), and Golder and Macy (2014) also demonstrate the potential privacy concerns associated with the rise of a big data  paradigm. boyd and Crawford (2012) suggest that the gratuitous use of even the kinds of ‘public’ data put on social networking sites is not justified merely because this data is ‘available and accessible’. They suggest that more attention needs to be paid towards traditional ethical notions of informed consent and the problems involved with analysing and interpreting people’s data in ways they might not have imagined or approved of when it

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was put out in the public domain. That, in combination with the ability to ‘reverse-engineer’ big data, begs the question of the ethical appropriateness of using data generated off persons without their knowledge or consent. Lastly, boyd and Crawford (2012) identify flaws in a dependence on abstracted, decontextualized data in any analysis of social life. By its nature, big data is reductive, aimed to fit  masses of diverse data into mathematical models in order to deliver description and prediction. As Anderson (2008) and Presnky (2009) advocate, and Wyly (2014) laments, the question of ‘why’ is not a priority for big data research. Theory or contextualization in a data-driven research paradigm is excluded. The problem here is, boyd and Crawford (2012) note, the essence of social life  is contextualization and meaning. Removing meaning and contextualization from social analysis simply leaves description. Such an endeavour can be seen as largely meaningless unless one has insight into the nature of relationships, correlations, and interactions: why they exist in the first place and what varying importance is placed on them by humans in a meaning-filled world. Without this contextualization, without meaning, social analysis becomes purely descriptive and inadequate except as an exercise in social mapping. Such a logic also exemplifies some ways that information and data are becoming increasingly separated from the contexts and people from which it is being collected. The logic of decontextualization – that explanation or contextualization of data is not required or necessary for its descriptive analysis – withdraws it from its socially contextual origins into a realm of pure analysis or pure description. Of course, aggregate and depersonalized data is the standard argument in support of ubiquitous data collection in the sense that when data gets separated from individuals and aggregated to the depersonalized level of the ‘dividual’ level or higher, such information ceases to be seen as a privacy problem or an ethical issue. However, this logic of decontextualized data placed into the automated technical realms of data mining, big data, and the radically pragmatic notion of ‘whatever works’ is the same logic that creates a situation where the personal image of a 15-year-old girl who committed suicide after a sexual assault can be scraped off the Internet and used in an ad for a dating website. Context is important. Thus, I would submit that decontextualization is also an ethical problem. As boyd and Crawford (2012) alluded, the use of data (and when we say ‘data’, we are referring to a person’s thoughts, preferences, images, and such, which happen to be articulated in terms of digital texts and images), even data in the ‘public

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domain’, has to be considered within the contexts of the autonomy of the person who articulated those thoughts and preferences. It would be unjust, no matter the level of abstraction, to take a person’s words or images and use them in ways which they would not approve, or which could do them harm, especially when they have not consented to their use. Data needs to retain the social context of the person of its origin in order to be treated ethically.

Dematerialization Unfortunately, happiness, performance, productivity, and other variables in our lives are complex, confusing, and chaotic processes. Every day we blindly make decisions we hope lead to improvement. To make matters worse, we judge success based on imperfect and biased feelings. The quantification of the world in which we live (Coté,  2014) has spread out into the material environments of embedded, embodied daily life. A good example of such a spread can be seen in the rise of the ‘Quantified Self (QS) movement’. The aim of quantified self is to move away from a situation where self-knowledge, discovery, and improvement is based on subjective feelings or intuition and instead centres around the objective analysis of data. This  movement started in  2007 at the behest of Gary Wold and Kevin Kelley of Wired magazine using the tagline, ‘self-knowledge through selftracking’, and its goal is to take advantage of the data collection, storage, and analysis strategies of ‘big data’ and combine them with new and emerging sets of personal measurement technologies and apps (such as Fitbits, iFit’s, and TrackYourHappiness), which can measure and quantify all forms of biometric, mood, perception, and behavioural data, from food intake, to happiness indicators, to exercise, to blood glucose levels. This passage above demonstrates the inherent link of quantified self with big data in the sense that it possesses the same insistence that solutions lie in the examination of data and the correlations of events, not in the theorizations of humans or one’s own self-awareness. Thus, they share faith in the explosion of measurement, but here, the measurement is based on a population of one (Nafas and Sherman,  2014). Indeed, Nafas and Sherman (2014) suggest that while intimately tied to big data, quantified self may be ‘soft resistance’ to big data paradigms in that its participants are using the endemic production of data for reflexive personal improvement, as opposed to giving it up to corporate aggregates where they simply become commodities for sale. As such, it can be

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thought of as an alternative mode to the current conventional relationships with data. In fact, both are the case. User agreements for these technologies include permissions to sell depersonalized and aggregate data to third parties and marketers such as Facebook or any other site (e.g. iFit,  2012). However, the quantified self is another manifestation of the dematerialization of the material body into quantified, calculable entities. Awareness becomes not of a material body but of data patterns and simulations of bodies which end up being a preferred form of self-knowledge and self-realization. The materiality of the contemporary body has increasingly become understood as a set of codes (binary, DNA, genomes, stem cells), which is ultimately programmable when understood. Indeed, the current developments which are taking place in the life sciences and medicine very much centre around the merging of the biological and computer sciences (Hayles,  1999; Thacker,  2003). Gaggioli et  al. (2003), Balsamo (1996), and Williams and Bendelow (1998) all point to the growing virtualization of the body, represented  in the form of computer codes and displayed on screens (which become ever more numerous in hospitals and health centres), scans, and increasingly through medical avatars. Balsamo (1996) refers to this as one aspect of the disappearing body, where the ‘meat’ of the body is coded into large electronic databases. Gaggioli et  al.’s (2003) discussion of medical avatars is another example of how the body, viewed as information, results in increasing attention to simulations of bodies  in medical science, rather than bodies themselves. Lyon (2001) early on in the sociology of the Internet linked increasing surveillance strategies to the notion of the ‘disappearing bodies’ in the sense that he saw the rise in surveillance as compensation for the  disappearing body as technology enabled more of social life to be conducted at a distance and beyond the realm of face-to-face interactions of bodily co-presence – a shift from co-presence to telepresence. Increased surveillance was both enabled and made necessary by modern technologies demanding interactions made at a distance to have some sense of assurance and to regulate an increasingly dispersed social life. This is only one part of the process, as technological surveillance of the body is also increasingly reductionist and based on processes of abstraction, not necessarily to compensate for a lack of boldly presence but to extract useful information from physically present bodies in order to shape their experience from a distance. As suggested by Haggerty and Ericson:

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A great deal of surveillance is directed towards the human body. The observed body is of a distinctly hybrid composition. First it is broken down by being abstracted from its territorial setting. It is then reassembled in different settings through a series of data flows. The result is a decorporealized body. A ‘data double’ of pure virtuality. (2000: 611)

In the extraction, abstraction, and quantification of the body into data, one needs to consider dematerialization of the body brought about by the rise of ambient intelligence. Ambient intelligence refers to emerging technologies which bring together ubiquitous computing and monitoring, ubiquitous communication through wireless networking, and intelligent or adaptive interfaces (Gagglioli et al., 2003; Miller, 2011). The ‘Internet of Things’ reflects increasingly automated connections between everyday physical objects to the Internet, creating environments of ‘smart objects’, which are no longer dependent on human input to obtain data. A combination of pervasive computing, monitoring, and ‘smart objects’ allows for the construction of physical environments that are responsive to the presence of people, creating an entirely new set of relationships between bodies and their environments, but also new opportunities for data collection. The ambition to make offline, material presence as productive of data as online presence is clear. As ambient intelligence pervades our physical environments with more sensory devices, our physical bodies will become as much the inadvertent producers of commodities for others as our virtual presences have become. Rouvroy (2008) points out the ramifications of such a culture as it spreads into the increasingly prolific, but largely invisible, processes of data collection being rolled out in the ‘real world’, where aspects of our lives which we previously never even had to think of as private can be and will be converted into vast amounts of data, making it almost impossible for anyone to maintain control of their information and how it will be used. Even though being online is less of a choice these days, given the increasing virtualization of government and commercial services, there is perhaps a shred of an argument that one ‘chooses’ to be present online and thus consents to varying forms of surveillance and data collection by choosing to go online in the first place while being aware that online data collection is pervasive there. It is, however, difficult to apply the same logic to offline environments, where people need to travel through and visit a myriad of public and private spaces to, for example, put fuel in their cars, see the doctor, or even just walk down the street.

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In this context, it is worthwhile noting that UK police have already collected over 18 million photographs for facial recognition purposes without any public consultation or consent (BBC, 2015). What this means for privacy and autonomy in its most basic considerations – freedom of choice and consent, the right to control our information, the right to control our property and likeness, the right to control our personal physical space, and the freedom from unwarranted intrusion or surveillance – is still hard to discern. However, the sheer amount of data collected, and the invisibility of its collection has the potential to make a mockery of the notion of consent, fundamental to our concept of privacy and autonomy. If we are going to try to hold on to such rights, a reconsideration of the tendency to abstract selves from data will be imperative.

The self, data, and autonomy The near free-for-all information collection and plundering of the dematerialized virtual or digital body stands in stark contrast to the ethical and legal weight placed on the material aspects of selves. The capturing and/or analysis of our physical attributes such as blood, hair, bodily waste, or even personal property still contain a meaningful link to a ‘person’ who is seen to have a right to autonomy and thus continues to be highly regulated and carries a great deal of legal, ethical, and interpersonal weight. One is simply not able, legally, to take from another person without their consent. This of course applies to personal property (of which the body may be considered a part), where theft would be the charge. To take and analyse bodily waste or parts in order to gain insight without permission, whether blood, hair, skin, is seen as not only ‘creepy’ by informal moral standards but also a violation of the right to privacy. To forcibly take such samples from the body would be considered assault, except in very specific and highly regulated circumstances, and to do so on one’s private property would be considered trespass and theft. While the physical or material aspects of selves are, in general, still seen to retain a connection to the person and widely protected in terms of rights to privacy, autonomy and ownership, the dematerialized, networked aspects of selves are increasingly open to collection, scrutiny, and analysis, especially for commercial gain. In that sense, it is clear that there are two different sets of legal and ethical stances between material and dematerialized aspects of the body, or

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the self. As more of our lives, interactions and presences occur and appear in online contexts, open for potential analysis and exploitation, this contradiction needs to be reconsidered.

Extension and distributed selves The Parsons’ image debacle was presented in the press as a ‘warning’ to teenagers, to remember that what they post online can end up anywhere, but this implies there is some sort of choice in the matter. In an age where every effort is made to separate data from individuals for instrumental use, people have very little autonomy in terms of what is taken from them and where it ends up. In fact, the spread of Parsons’ image, without her permission and without her knowledge both before and after her death, demonstrates the extent to which we have to question what a self is that exists in these digital environments and how much of what we deem to comprise the self has become exteriorized into these technologies through the processes of what Bernard Stiegler refers to as exteriorization and proletarianization: the processes by which human faculties are increasingly located outside of themselves in technologies. Indeed, Stiegler (1998,  2008) suggests that there is no, and never has been, basis for humans which exists outside technology. Stiegler suggests that philosophy has misconceived technics and, as a result, misunderstood its thinking about humans (Clark,  2011). Instead of looking to biological or transcendental descriptions, the human is to be found in the primary coupling of humans and technology or the inscription of the living into the non-living through memory. Conventionally, memory can be thought of in two forms: genetic memory, in which one’s genes are passed through the generations, and epigenetic or somatic memory, that which resides in the nervous system of the individual in terms of knowledge and experience gained through living. The first transcends one’s lifespan; the second ends with one’s death, unless this is somehow passed on to other generations through some form of communication involving things external to ourselves. This brings us to the third form of memory: epiphylogenetic. This is a technical memory in the sense that it involves technologies external to us to carry knowledge, ideas, and experiences. These could be explicit and intentional forms of communication, such as language, writing, photography, or drawings, or objects which implicitly carry knowledge and memory such as tools and other forms of material culture, like pottery, machines, or buildings.

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The materiality of these technologies allows transcendence, as the knowledge contained within them outlives the lifespan of the individual and passes such ideas and experiences down the generations and thus allows and continues the legacy of human memory and culture. (Clark, 2011). In other words, there is no ‘pure’ or pre-technological human, because technics is inscribed in what it is to be human through the structural coupling of the living with the non-living: of human consciousness with technics. In a Derridean manner, Stiegler deconstructs the human by pointing out the impossibility of pure or essential humanness, or a self-referencing interiority or presence independent of externality. In this case, the externality of technologies upon which human knowledge, culture, and consciousness itself is dependent. As Coté (2010) phrases it, the exteriorization of the human into technologies marks the very threshold of the human itself. While such a relationship has always been the case, Stiegler suggests that recent history has involved an intensification of exteriorization. Building on Marx’s concept of proletarianization, he suggests that during industrial capitalism the physical capacities, skills, and ways of doing things associated with craftsmanship were exteriorized into industrial machines. As labour was deskilled, an increased vulnerability to the demands of capital was created as workers’ collective knowledge became formalized in machines and escaped their possession. Workers lost their capacities to ‘know how to do’, or to master their tools, and became enslaved by machines they tended on the factory floor and elsewhere. Contemporary ‘cognitive’ capitalism, with its focus on weightless economies of calculation, creativity, and other aspects of what is often referred to as informational or knowledge labour (Fuchs,  2010; Rey,  2012), has pressed further to exteriorize all forms of knowledge including the social and intellectual capacities of humans. Informational labour gets exteriorized into software packages and algorithms to the point where what were considered to be solid, middle-class professions, such as accountancy, are now threatened with extinction as their work becomes automated (Frey and Osborne, 2013). Thus, even knowledge production has been proletarianized by cognitive technologies as people become information handlers instead of knowledgeable workers. Affect and desire too are exteriorized into advertising and media, to the point where they cease to be human capacities and instead become controlled and manipulated by technical forces and industries. Indeed, all aspects of life, from

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child-raising (where televisions and DVDs are used to babysit children we no longer know how to) to looking after our ageing parents (into whose lives robots are increasingly playing a role in place of family members; see Turkle,  2011), are capabilities which have escaped us and are now maintained by machines. In short, people are losing the knowledge of how to live as all human capacities are exteriorized into the technical apparatus of contemporary capitalism. Stiegler provides a compelling account of the embedding of the human within the technological (and vice versa) by illuminating how human knowledge, memory, and consciousness has always been exteriorized in various technologies and how one needs to imagine the location of the human as not only in a ‘mind’ or a ‘body’ but also in the assemblage of technologies which make humans what they are. In using digital media, and in particular search engines and social media, information about ourselves and others is increasingly retained both voluntarily and otherwise. Many aspects of our lives are gathered and retained in databases, creating a situation where our consciousness is increasingly and perpetually mediated as it is lived (Hutnyk, 2012). As Coté (2014) points out, the big data that is now endemic to our lives is the exteriorization of memory, everyday experience, and the mediated actions of life. The capturing of our data is ‘not something that happens to us; it is constitutive of our being as digital humans’; our being is data-encumbered (Coté, 2014: 141). Indeed, Brian Rotman (again influenced by Derrida) makes a similar point in Becoming Beside Ourselves, where he refers to the rise of digital technologies creating the subjectivity of the ‘parallel’ or ‘Quantum’ self. Far from being selfenclosed or self-contained ‘I’, as manifest in the concept of ‘mind’ or ‘psyche’, the parallel self of digital life is an assemblage, a co-occurrence of a myriad of virtual states which exist in the pluralized form through a variety of avatars, profiles, databases, image banks, and the like, which are stored on networked servers located in different parts of the globe. It is a self of dispersed, networked co-presences which operate simultaneously and are always in perpetual formation and reformation: Such an ‘I’ is porous, spilling out of itself, traversed by other ‘I’s’ networked to it, permeated by the collectivities of other selves and avatars via apparatuses (mobile phone or e-mail, ambient interactive devices, Web pages, apparatuses of surveillance, GPS systems) that form its techno-cultural environment and increasingly break down self-other boundaries thought previously to be

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Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media uncrossable: what was private exfoliates (is blogged, Web-cammed, posted) directly into the social. At the same time the social is introjected into the interior of the self, making it ‘harder and harder to say where the world stops, and the person begins’. (Rotman, 2008: 8)

As Rotman suggests, the distributed self has no interior or exterior, no private or public, as its components dissolve through networks in unanticipated directions, creating unknown and unanticipated presences. It is a self largely made of externalized data.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that the nature of contemporary digital culture has been to abstract selves: to increasingly measure and quantify selves and to separate these selves from the information they produce. This is a fundamental contradiction because, as suggested in the latter part of this chapter, the contemporary self in digital culture is, to an increasing extent, exteriorized, embedded, and distributed in networked technologies. It is made up of the information it produces. Can a distributed or parallel self have a right to privacy? Or even any expectation of privacy? If what makes up this self is to be treated as ‘data’, something separated from the self it represents and transformed into something commodifiable, then the answer – in a weightless, knowledge economy – has to be no. The distributed or parallel self can expect to have fewer and fewer ‘rights’ as more of it is abstracted into ‘representative’ data. Therefore, one solution to the problem of privacy and autonomy in contemporary digital culture I suggest involves moving away from what Gumbrecht (2004) termed a ‘representational culture’ and towards a ‘presence culture’. Modern Western culture is decidedly more representational in that it follows a Platonic ontological tendency to separate material aspects of things and beings from their essential qualities, or the idea of the object from the object itself. This is best articulated in Plato’s theory of the forms, which counterposed the true and eternal essences of things with their more flawed, itinerant, material counterparts. Plato essentially recognized the reality of abstract forms over their material existence. By contrast, the presence culture Gumbrecht advocates follows Aristotle, who critiqued Plato’s theory of the forms from a more materialist perspective.

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He emphasized the peculiarity of individual things and beings and suggested that they are a hylomorphic composite of matter, what a thing ‘is’ (what it is composed of), and form, how a thing is perceptible (its appearance or shape). In this view, both matter and form have elements of the physical or material in them. There is no distinction made between the material and the conceptual, no attempt to abstract one from the other.

Notes 1

2

3

‘Privacy’ is a complex and contested term. Yar (2014) outlines four broad spheres of legal rights related to privacy: freedom of personal autonomy (i.e. freedom of choice), the right to control personal information, the right to control personal property (including one’s likeness and information), and the right to control and protect personal physical space. Total property, plant, and equipment value (i.e. the physical assets) for these companies is quite low at $16.5 billion for Google and $2.9 billion for Facebook (Stock Analysis on Net 2013; http://www.stock-analysis-on.net) (accessed 3 June 2019). In 2019, Google (as Alphabet) is worth 1.153 trillion dollars with 98,771 employees, and Facebook worth 203 billion with 35,587 employees. It is important to consider that ‘representation’ may be the wrong word here, as ‘simulation’ might be a better term to describe dividual data constructions such as profiles.

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Embodied verification: Linking identities and bodies on NSFW Reddit Emily van der Nagel

On a panel about studying difficult imagery, I was asked a difficult question. I was at the 2017 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Tartu, Estonia, and I had been explaining that on Reddit Gonewild, an exhibitionist subreddit, women post selfies of their naked or sexualized bodies without including their faces. The panel canvassed different approaches to studying images of people in violent, vulnerable, or sexual contexts. The Gonewild subreddit had to be treated carefully, I argued, with respect to the posters, and I’d taken care in my research to discuss the decisions they made about what identifying information they included in their photos without identifying them. The question was about another ethical aspect of the research project: ‘But how  do you know the women in the photos consent to having their images posted on Gonewild in the first place?’ I realized that, having studied Gonewild since 2012, I no longer saw its intricacies as novel – and that I’d missed the chance to delve into one of its most interesting aspects. ‘Because of the verification system’, I replied. ‘The women go through a process of verifying their bodies without revealing their named identities.’ This chapter focuses on verification: the confirmation that an account is linked with a particular person. This is a practice that in some cases is quite visible online. Facebook and microblogging platforms Twitter and Weibo, for example, are real-name platforms with processes for guiding and authenticating identities that legal scholars Tal Zarsky and Norberto de Andrade (2013: 1338) call ‘identity intermediaries’. For example, on Twitter, people can opt in to verify their account by setting their tweets as visible to the public and filling out their profile with personal information, including their phone number, email address, biography, profile and header photos, birthdate, and personal website. This verification system draws on official personal information – following historian

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Craig Robertson (2010), I use the term ‘official’ to describe the kind of identity that is articulated through formal cards, papers, and passports provided by governments and enabled by bureaucratic systems of documentation. Drawing on these documents creates credibility on a platform that invites anyone with an internet-connected device to sign up. By contrast, verification on Gonewild, which has been adopted by other subreddits with Not Safe For Work (NSFW) or adult content, asks people posting to verify themselves with selfies. They submit photos of their bodies – some include their faces, but most leave them out – holding up a handwritten sign with their Reddit username, the name of the subreddit, and the date. Verification is manually reviewed by a team of volunteer moderators, and successfully verified Redditors display the platform’s logo, an alien head symbol known as a Snoo (Reddit, 2018), next to their username. In contrast to Twitter, identity can be verified via bodily correspondence while pseudonymity through traditional naming markers is preserved. Scholarship on social media verification is still emerging; it’s a novel field of research. Usually, the term ‘verification’ refers to journalistic practices of proving that breaking news posted to social media is true, as in an article by Petter Brandtzaeg et  al. (2016) that argues verification of social media sources and content is a challenge for journalists. Alfred Hermida even refers to verification as an active undertaking by journalists: ‘Through the discipline of verification, journalists determine the truth, accuracy, or validity of news events’, Hermida (2012:  659) argues. Robertson (2010) describes verification as a process of comparison, usually comparing a fact or theory to reality. This process involves standards of objectivity as well as a clearly defined, stable object, like an identity document, to compare with the evidence at hand, like a person’s Twitter account. This chapter traces evolving modes of identity verification from historical documents through contemporary digital genres to make a distinction between a humanist age of the body representing a fixed identity and a posthumanist age where a connection between a body and a social media account makes room for fluidities and multiplicities. It first investigates identity documents that distinguish one person from the next and formalize connections between a person and their family, property, finances, and citizenship. I then turn to how these identity documents function as part of social media verification systems. On Twitter, a blue tick is bestowed upon people who link their account to government-issued identity documents. On Weibo, tiered verification symbols communicate whether the platform considers someone to be an individual, celebrity, or organization.

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These forms of official verification draw from established identification systems. On Reddit, a different way of identifying a person occurs. No identity documents are needed for this kind of embodied verification – simply a confirmation that someone is posting photographs of themselves. This chapter brings together threads from literature on identification documents, social media identities, capitalist platforms, embodiment, and posthumanism to make two main arguments. First, that by linking a social media account with identity information that has been socioculturally constructed as valid, platforms reassert the importance of materiality. But in doing so, platforms are also making the explicit claim that unverified accounts are less trustworthy and legitimate. Thus, verification sets up a dichotomy between virtual and material, and regards the virtual as, if not inferior, then certainly limited in some important ways. It speaks to the Cartesian dualism that the mind and body are fundamentally separate entities. Platforms cast the asynchronous, geographically dispersed, virtual kind of communication they offer as a limitation when they present verification as a way to overcome that limitation by reconnecting the virtual with the material. My second argument involves making a distinction between official verification and embodied verification to suggest that the latter productively pushes back against the dominance of the official identity. Instead, seeking to connect a social media account with only the information required to confirm the consent of the person in the image illustrates a posthuman understanding of fluid, contextual, multifaceted online identities. The humanist model of identity markers linked information to material bodies and social identity markers. This kind of ‘naming’ called on identified individuals not to step outside the behavioural norms of the social system. The new system reverses this: it creates a space to step beyond these norms. Embodied verification protects the individual, identified, material body from social constraints by verifying the identifiable, virtual-material body, so that individual cannot be shamed.

Identity documents: Linking a person with identifying information Social media verification builds on historically constructed identification documents like cards, licences, and passports. To make an argument for why embodied verification works against concepts of the control and accountability

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of personhood through the body, I first point to some key moments and understandings in the history of the official identity. Assigning individuals official documents that could verify their identity dates back to at least early-sixteenth-century France, when parish registers began to record baptisms, marriages, and deaths (Caplan and Torpey, 2002). In Jane Caplan and James Torpey (2002) names are at the core of identity and apparatuses of identification. Legal names developed unevenly throughout Europe and the United Kingdom as literacy, property law, and financial transactions became established, along with increases in the size of societies and personal mobility. Identity documents were eventually entrenched as legal and practical objects that constituted proof that the bearer is accurately described and belongs to the system that produced the document (Caplan and Torpey, 2002) and can thus reap the benefits of being in that system. From the 1920s onwards, the passport gained traction as a way of governing residence and movement, effectively linking the individual subject with national identity. Robertson (2010) reminds us that the passport has only been considered an acceptable way to document and confirm individual identities since the 1920s in the United States. Identity information, including a name, birthdate, gender, and address, became necessary to record as societies grew too big to know each person individually, and practical as bureaucracy provided the means to systematically collect and store information. This information soon expanded to link someone’s identity to their body through photographs, signatures, and fingerprints. As identity documents became increasingly digitized, these bureaucratized representations of bodies were joined by advancements in iris scanning, voice modulations, and facial recognition technology (Gates, 2011). Official identification documents stabilize identity as a fixed object, one that can be relied upon for governing (Robertson, 2010). Governments were motivated to establish these documents to monitor the international movement of their citizens, as well as confirming access to the right and benefits they are entitled to, such as voting or receiving medical care or welfare payments (Torpey, 2000). This documentary regime of information (Robertson, 2010) involves tokens of authority that carry information that uniquely represents an individual – what Lisa Gitelman (2008) calls ‘bibliographic bodies’. These official identification documents persist in digitally networked forms of communication: on realname platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo, scans and photographs of objects like passports and driver’s licences are still demanded of people who wish to verify themselves.

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Twitter and Weibo: Linking an account with identity documents Government documents were secure social markers that promised access to services, and alignment within social order. A social media platform, as for-profit media of networking, has a different set of responsibilities to its populace: to avoid duplication, to mine data for profit via demographic and consumer information, to permit the flow and gaining of social capital, and to encourage and maintain the platform culture and communities of sociality (van Dijck, 2013). Different platforms encourage different cultures and practices of sociality. Instead of signing up to a platform like Twitter to vote or visit a doctor, people enter their name, username, and image so they can send short messages with links or images to networks of followers, and follow others to receive their messages. But on Twitter and Weibo, a reliance on these official identification documents to prove someone’s identity still exists. Verification, represented by a blue tick next to someone’s username, began on Twitter in 2009 after a spate of celebrity impersonators prompted the platform to instigate a system for guaranteeing accounts that were in the public interest, and therefore at risk of impersonation, were authentic (Stone,  2009). Twitter originally contacted public figures themselves and had them proceed through a short onboarding process to become verified, which, according to journalist Casey Newton, meant that the verification badge ‘came to carry a sheen of authority: this person, the badge suggested, is a known quantity. This is an account that Twitter trusts’ (Newton, 2017: n.p.). From 2016, Twitter allowed users to apply for verification themselves, asking people to make their account public and submit their real name, birthdate, phone number, image of their driver’s licence or passport, a photo of themselves as their display picture, a Twitter biography that mentioned an area of expertise, links to websites showing the person is of public interest, and a paragraph explaining why they think they should be verified (Lee, 2016). In 2017, the system became controversial when its blue tick of trust was displayed by people considered untrustworthy by the public and not worthy of verification, most notably white supremacist Jason Kessler. Twitter addressed the outrage by suspending processing new verification applications: Verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance. We recognize that we have created this confusion and need to resolve it.

(Twitter Support, 2017)

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This tweet shows that Twitter’s verification system has entangled two purposes of verification: confirming an identity, and endorsing worthiness. Or at least, that was how Twitter users understood the tick. In March 2018, Twitter aimed to disentangle those two separate inferences behind verification. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey suggested in a livestream that Twitter would soon be allowing ‘everyone’ to be verified, not just those accounts in the public interest (Dorsey in Garun, 2018), but as of mid-2019, there were no details about how this new verification system would operate. This decision will reveal how Twitter intends to enmesh identity with data, communicating which aspects of a person are salient to their online self. In contrast to Twitter’s binary system of the verified and unverified, on Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo, verification occurs in tiers. Like on Twitter, these verifications function as an indication of authenticity, credibility, and trustworthiness, which Lulu Wei (2017) argues is also a form of control. Verified individual accounts bear an orange V; organizational accounts have a blue V. While any account must submit identification documents to be verified, only organizations are charged a fee to display the corresponding verification symbol. Big Vs commonly refer to public figures or celebrities. Verification is becoming a more nuanced, platform-oriented version of the direct top-down censoring of user-generated content by the Chinese government. Because Weibo doesn’t insist that every user verify their accounts, Wei suggests the system is a way of nudging, rather than mandating, real names on the platforms. But the more Weibo claims that verification improves user experience and safety, the stronger the emphasis on the verification system. For Ronggui Huang and Xiaoyi Sun (2014), expansion of verification on Weibo may lead to activists being exposed to government surveillance if they need to disclose their identities and professional credentials before their microblogging is taken seriously and circulated widely. These platform policies and verification systems matter. Tarleton Gillespie (2018) argues that platforms are powerful digital intermediaries that carefully position themselves as impartial and noninterventionist – simply blank templates for people to fill with content and communication. But increasingly, platforms regard themselves as public arbiters of cultural value and enact guidelines that are becoming parameters for how public speech is privately governed. Verification, and the identity information that qualifies someone for a tick or a V, is important when we understand platforms as interfaces that guide how people build identities. Alison Hearn (2017) studies verification as part of a culture of big data, calling self-presentation a crucial part of the economic

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infrastructure of affective capitalism. She argues the Twitter verification tick is an affective lure that incentivizes a specific style of self-presentation. It’s also an expression of capitalist logics, as the ideal type of selfhood in the big data age is linked, networked, and verifiable in terms of the standards set by the platform. Linking the material with the informational is historically a process of confirming an identity for the purposes of citizenship, rights, social organization, access to services, and administrative control. On social media, platforms provide a verification system that aims to keep people actively using the platform by posting content that others browse and interact with by voting, commenting, and subscribing to the subreddit. This represents a shift in motivation from governments governing to platforms building audiences they can monetize. But linking someone’s social media account to their official identification documents isn’t the only way to communicate trust and consent. When verification is focused on identity documents that contain uniquely identifying information, this encourages people to communicate in a manner that fits the most publicly facing version of themselves. When a verification system is developed with consent for nude selfies in mind, rather than to assure other users that public figures aren’t being falsely represented, the type of self expressed through the platform must centre on an entirely different set of identity facets. Social media verification has the potential to operate as a system that confirms identity, not only to prevent misrepresentation and fraud but to facilitate creative self-representation and anonymity.

Embodied verification on Reddit Gonewild: Linking an account with a body On the largely pseudonymous Reddit Gonewild, linking an account with a persistent, government-issued identity is not as important as obtaining consent for the intimate or nude self-portrait images that circulate. In this context, verification aims to associate a body with a user account, not with a p ­ reestablished system of legal and bureaucratic control. As the subreddit Gonewild outlines in the subreddit rules: The purpose of verification is NOT to connect your picture to a real live person, but rather to connect the picture to the reddit username. We don’t care about who you are in real life and we don’t even want to know. All we care about is that you are in the photo and you consent to being posted. (xs51, 2017)

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Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media Verifying gives us all a little peace of mind. The mods and users know you’ve consented, and the people seeking a genuine experience know that you’re not an internet porn star and rather are a little ‘closer to home’. Once verified, you get ‘flair’, which is a little icon that shows next to your name when you post in Gonewild. (xs51, 2017)

This verification system originated on Gonewild, the oldest and largest NSFW subreddit, and has been taken up by others: ‘Our verification rules are based entirely on those of/r/gonewild’, claims igwmod (2014: n.p.), a moderator for the IndiansGonewild subreddit. I have previously written about verification as an act that proves consent, as including a Reddit username, the date, and the name of the subreddit in a photograph with their body is a way of asserting the person posting their selfie took it with the intention of uploading it to Gonewild (van der Nagel, 2013). This appeals to other Redditors, who claim this verification process gives them a sense of intimacy when browsing the selfies (van der Nagel and Frith, 2015). The Gonewild moderators give a ‘nudetorial’ on how to take acceptable photos for the verification process, in a way that inverts the language for official identification photo requirements. For example, the Australian Passport Office asks for: Good quality, colour gloss prints, less than six months old Clear, focused image with no marks or ‘red eye’ Plain white or light grey background that contrasts with your face Uniform lighting (no shadows or reflections) with appropriate brightness and contrast to show natural skin tone Face looking directly at the camera and not tilted in any direction Hair off the face so that the edges of the face are visible Eyes open, mouth closed Neutral expression (not smiling, laughing or frowning), which is the easiest way for border systems to match you to your image. (Australian Passport Office, 2018: n.p.)

By contrast, Reddit Gonewild advises: Don’t include your face in your pictures. Crop your face out with an image editor, keep your face outside the frame in the first place, or obfuscate your face with the camera flash. Just as you’ve excluded your face, exclude other things that could be used to identify you.

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You should blur out tattoos or maybe certain birth marks someone could recognize if they’ve seen you in a low cut or sleeveless shirt. Don’t stand next to the wacky lamp that everyone in your dorm knows you for. We’re not looking for a boring mugshot of you in front of a blank white wall, though. You CAN be creative even under these constraints. Take it up as part of the challenge. Dress up your room a little! Reverse the comforter on your bed. Clear off the bathroom counter. Do anything to make the picture look sexy and fun, but make yourself a little less recognizable – a little harder to place. This is your alter ego! (xs51, 2017: n.p.)

By giving advice on acceptable lighting, background, and poses, both the Passport Office and Reddit Gonewild ask people in the photos to depict themselves authentically, albeit in two very different contexts. Each set of guidelines is designed to ensure that a physical body that represents an individual connects with attendant information – whether a Reddit username or a legal name and date of birth. While both processes involve photos of the self, the photos on Gonewild have particular resonance as locations of authenticity. Naked bodies and selfies represent truth, vulnerability, and intimacy. Nudity amplifies the power of the photograph, which Susan Sontag ([1971]  2002:  6) claims has a ‘presumption of veracity … authority, interest, seductiveness’. Selfies are often considered to be representations of how a person authentically and intimately sees themselves, as the act of taking and uploading a selfie involves the person in the photo becoming a model, a thespian on stage, and a self-reflecting embodied subject all at once (Warfield, 2015). But what happens when selfies stand in for bodies, or for other kinds of information about a person?

Reconnecting, and playing with, the virtual and the material Understanding that a person’s body exists in a different register to information about that person is key to the verification process. The informational and the material operate separately, yet always potentially together. Social media verification operates with the assumption that material bodies and virtual identities exist separately and need tangible evidence to link them together. This perspective initially seems to draw on the Cartesian dualism that the mind is distinct from the body. But according to Garry Young and Monica Whitty (2010), even though cyberspace might occasionally give the impression

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that bodies don’t matter when people are separated by screens, Cartesian dualism is ultimately an untenable philosophical position. ‘The more we try to disengage with the body, the more its importance is revealed to us’ (Young and Whitty, 2010: 224), they argue, after considering the possibility that people could invent different personas for online communication. When Esther Milne (2010) discusses disembodiment in epistolary communication, she identifies a desire to eclipse the material technology of communication – to erase or ‘see through’ the medium of writing (or in the case of Gonewild, the medium of the screen) in order to create presence and therefore intimacy. I could see this desire, and this intimacy, take shape on Gonewild, when I took note of the image titles that saw posters addressing an invisible subject as though they were in the same room, although these people will likely never meet. Titles like ‘May I be your [f]uck toy?’; ‘Naked in the kitchen! What do you want (f)or breakfast?:)’; or ‘I want a volunteer to grab me by the hips and bend me over;) [f]’ (quoted in van der Nagel, 2017, the [f] to designate a female in the photo) appeal to an imagined sex partner to whom they are showing off their body. People put time and effort into imbuing their mediated communication with intimacy. danah boyd argues: Unlike everyday embodiment, there is no digital corporeality without articulation. One cannot simply ‘be’ online; one must make one’s presence visible through explicit and structured actions. (boyd, 2007: 145)

These actions aim to create the feeling that interfaces and devices aren’t in between two bodies at all. But even when communicative interfaces are noticed by interlocutors, and there is the potential for a person to lie about aspects of their identity, online chat necessarily involves two bodies being physically present at their camera, keyboard, or screen. Don Slater (1998: 4) wrote in his study of trading what he calls ‘sexpics’ on text-based chatroom Internet Relay Chat that even when a fellow chatter’s identity was unconfirmed or unknown, ‘there must really be a body out there’. The sexpic trade on IRC contains similarities with Gonewild: it features what Slater calls ‘amateurs’, meaning people who create and exchange sexy photos for their own enjoyment rather than for profit, interacting with strangers under nicknames they have chosen to flirt and show off their naked bodies. Slater’s work responded to internet scholarship in the  1990s, which entertained the fantasy that people and communication could exist in a virtual world entirely divorced from any form of physicality. As N Katherine Hayles put it:

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The posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation … there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation. (Hayles, 1999: 2–3)

When Hayles considers the virtual, she sees a duality between information and materiality: both worlds existing in parallel. Verification on social media attempts to connect these parallel worlds, drawing on and formalizing conventions as old as Usenet, a bulletin board established in  1980. Judith Donath says people added signatures to their Usenet posts as a gesture – however unreliable – to ‘anchor the virtual persona to the real-world person’ (Donath,  1999:  38). Again, verification functions as the connection between these ostensibly separate worlds. In the humanist age of the body as identity, names and photographs of faces were most often combined with information to locate a person geographically and politically in terms of their address, age, gender, and nationality. These  identification documents assumed that people had these attributes in a reasonably fixed way – changing a surname after marriage or moving house meant reporting these alterations to a government body and being issued a new driver’s licence, healthcare card, or passport. These documents came with unique identification numbers, as they were predicated on the idea that they uniquely located an individual. Posthumanist social media verification does not require someone to have only one account or pseudonym. Reddit has a culture of temporary, alter-ego, throwaway accounts (Leavitt,  2015). Twitter’s mobile interface allows people to easily toggle between accounts. Facebook might have a real-name policy, but information like names or addresses are more easily changed there than on a passport, and users are encouraged to periodically update their profile and cover images. Embodied verification recognizes this assumed fluidity. There are many ways to integrate a digital layer of information with a corporeal body, and embodied verification focuses on the identity information required to proceed with the task at hand: communicating consent for the sexualized depiction of a body within this subreddit. Like the Cartesian dualism I rejected earlier, there’s more complexity at work here than a split between mind and body, or between the informational and material. Technology is not being eclipsed here; rather, it is strategically manipulated. Within the verified images on Gonewild, there’s playfulness in the tease of revealing selfies of the body without the face, of creating intimacy without including an official identity. This sense of play is grounded in the spirit

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of the subreddit: a fun, naughty, adult space to show off sexy selfies. Verification is what communicates trust and consent without asking for people to formalize their identity credentials.

Conclusion Instead of expressing ‘this account belongs to this individual’, Reddit’s verification system declares, ‘this account belongs to the body in these pictures’. In this way, embodied verification functions as an indicator of consent for the image to be posted and pushes back against real names and official identities. In contrast to the humanist understanding of the body as the centre of a social, cultural, political, and legal identity, embodied verification presents the body as just one facet of a person. None of this is fixed or immutable. All processes of social media verification represent changing ideas of selfies, of platforms, and of the self. At first glance, verification may seem to stem from a Cartesian dualism: the mind exists separately to the body. But it’s actually a process of re-emphasizing the material in the virtual, whether that material self is the official, governmentissued kind, or a more fluid, posthuman kind that recognizes we have one body, but many different ways of being in the world. Platforms offer verification because they are motivated by what Hearn (2017) calls capitalist logics. Verification promises trust, which aims to keep people using the platform. Bigger numbers of platform users mean more advertising can be targeted to people within specific demographics, increasing revenue for the platform’s stakeholders. People use the verification system to display this platform-encoded symbol of trust, and on NSFW Reddit, to engage in creative, contextualized, playful, sexual forms of self-representation by sharing their ‘alter ego’ selfies. This chapter argues that this kind of embodied verification de-emphasizes formal, legal, and bureaucratic systems of identification in favour of a consentfocused model, which facilitates intimate, sexual sharing of selfies in public. Twitter’s blue tick, Weibo’s blue and orange Vs, and Reddit’s Snoo are simple symbols that represent complex entanglements of platform affordances and user practices. By remaining open to verification systems that don’t involve bureaucratically instantiated identification information, platforms have the potential to recognize a posthuman, multifaceted concept of identity.

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References Australian Passport Office. (2018), ‘Passport Photo Guidelines’, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Available online: https://www.passports.gov.au/passportsexplained/how-apply/passport-photo-guidelines (accessed 7 May 2018). boyd, d. (2007), ‘None of This Is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster’, in J. Karaganis (ed.), Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, 132–157, New York: Social Science Research Council. Brandtzaeg, P. B., M. Lüders, J. Spangenberg, L. Rath-Wiggins, and A. Følstad (2016), ‘Emerging Journalistic Verification Practices Concerning Social Media’, Journalism Practice, 10: 323–342. Caplan, J. and J. Torpey (2002), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Donath, J. S. (1999), ‘Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community’, in M. Smith and P. Kollock (eds), Communities in Cyberspace, 29–59, London: Routledge. Garun, N. (2018), ‘Twitter May Eventually Let Anyone Become Verified’, The Verge, 8 March. Available online: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17098178/ twitter-open-verification-all-users-jack-dorsey-livestream (accessed 7 May 2018). Gates, K. A. (2011), Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, New York: New York University Press. Gillespie, T. (2018), ‘Governance of and by Platforms’, in J. Burgess, A. Marwick, and T. Poell (eds), Sage Handbook of Social Media, 254–278, London: Sage. Gitelman, L. (2008), Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture, Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literatures and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hearn, A. (2017), ‘Verified: Self-Presentation, Identity Management, and Selfhood in the Age of Big Data’, Popular Communication, 15 (2): 62–77. Hermida, A. (2012), ‘Tweets and Truth: Journalism as a Discipline of Collaborative Verification’, Journalism Practice, 6: 659–668. Huang, R. and X. Sun (2014), ‘Weibo Network, Information Diffusion and Implications for Collective Action in China’, Information, Communication & Society, 17: 86–104. igwmod. (2014), ‘Introducing Verification!’, Reddit. Available online: https://www. reddit.com/r/IndiansGoneWild/comments/1yz93h/introducing_verification/ (accessed 7 May 2018). Leavitt, A. (2015), ‘“This Is a Throwaway Account”: Temporary Technical Identities and Perceptions of Anonymity in a Massive Online Community’, presented at ComputerSupported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 14–18 March, Vancouver, Canada. Lee, K. (2016), ‘How to Get Verified on Twitter’, Buffer Social, 5 October. Available online: https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-get-verified-on-twitter (accessed 7 May 2018).

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Milne, E. (2010), Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence, New York: Routledge. Newton, C. (2017), ‘Twitter’s Verification Program Was a Mess from the Start’, The Verge, 10 November. Available online: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16631774/ twitter-verification-kessler-milo-abuse (accessed 20 December 2017). Robertson, C. (2010), The Passport in America: The History of a Document, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reddit. (2018), ‘What’s Snoo?’ Reddit Blog, 5 June 2013. Available online: https:// redditblog.com/2013/06/05/whats-snoo/ (accessed 7 May 2017). Slater, D. (1998), ‘Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet’, Body & Society, 4 (4): 91–117. Sontag, S. ([1971] 2002), On Photography, London: Penguin. Stone, B. (2009), ‘Not Playing Ball’, Twitter Blog, 6 June. Available online: https://blog. twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2009/not-playing-ball.html (accessed 7 May 2018). Torpey, J. (2000), The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Twitter Support. (2017), ‘Verification Was Meant to Authenticate Identity’, Twitter, 10 November, 3.03am. Available online: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/ status/928654369771356162 (accessed 19 December 2017). van der Nagel, E. (2013), ‘Faceless Bodies: Negotiating Technological and Cultural Codes on Reddit Gonewild’, Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10 (2). Available online: http://scan.net.au/scn/journal/vol10number2/Emily-van-der-Nagel.html. van der Nagel, E. (2017), ‘Social Media Pseudonymity: Affordances, Practices, Disruptions’, PhD thesis, Swinburne University of Technology. van der Nagel, E. and J. Frith (2015), ‘Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and the Agency of Online Identity: Examining the Social Practices of r/Gonewild’, First Monday, 20 (3). Available online: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5615/4346. van Dijck, J. (2013), The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warfield, K. (2015), ‘Digital Subjectivities and Selfies: The Model, the Self-Conscious Thespian, and the #realme’, International Journal of the Image, 6 (2): 1–16. Wei, L. (2017), ‘Gatekeeping Practices in the Chinese Social Media and the Legitimacy Challenge’, in U. Kohl (ed.), The Net and the Nation State: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Internet Governance, 69–81, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xs51. (2017), ‘The Gonewild FAQ’, Reddit. Available online: https://www.reddit.com/r/ gonewild/wiki/faq (accessed 19 December 2017). Young, G. and M. T. Whitty (2010), ‘In Search of the Cartesian Self: An Examination of Disembodiment Within 21st-Century Communication’, Theory & Psychology, 20 (2): 209–229. Zarsky, T. Z. and N. N. G. de Andrade (2013), ‘Regulating Electronic Identity Intermediaries: The “Soft eID” Conundrum’, Ohio State Law Journal, 74 (6): 1335–1400.

3

#ILYSM*: Instagram as fan practice Hattie Liew

Introduction Recent fan research reveals the intimate relationship contemporary fandom has with digital technology. In particular, internet platforms have been extremely conducive to grassroots cultural production and participatory culture, of which fandom is an illustrative example (Jenkins,  2006; Jenkins et  al.,  2018). This included fan fiction archives online (De Kosnik,  2016), online fanzines (Smith,  1999), and fan-driven crowdfunding (Bennett et  al.,  2015; Chin et  al.,  2014). Various fandoms have flourished on social media, particularly on Twitter and tumblr, where unique media fan cultures have adopted tumblr vernacular, sarcastic tone of voice, and heavy use of GIFs (Hillman et  al.,  2014a, b; Misailidou,  2017). Through studying digital fan practices, authors argue that the internet mediates the formation of fan communities shaped by the affordances of and communication norms within specific platforms. Scholars have also interrogated how social media reconfigures the relationship between fans and celebrities away from traditional gatekeepers like managers (Bennett, 2013, 2014), giving fans ‘the appearance and performance of “backstage” access’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011: 139). It is worth mentioning that many types of fan practices pre-date social media. However, social media, the internet, and digital technology in general augment the capacity for fannish activities (Baym,  2018) and make practices that were confined within fan communities in the past more visible to those outside these circles (Coppa, 2008; Stanfill and Condis, 2014). While present research on media fandom online provides interesting insights into contemporary cultural practices, a substantial portion of it focuses on cult media (e.g. Star Trek) or global celebrities (e.g. Lady Gaga), and consequently the platforms those fandoms gather on (e.g. tumblr). This may be because many

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prominent fan scholars are themselves fans of these texts or celebrities and adopt an ‘aca-fan’ (Jenkins, 2006) position in their work. Hence, other forms of media and celebrities are underrepresented in academic research. An example is the DIY celebrity (Holmes, 2004; Redmond and Holmes, 2007), or ordinary individuals who gain name recognition through the bottom-up production and circulation of celebrity via reality television, digital media, and the internet (Redmond,  2013). This chapter aims to address this gap, by turning our attention to the internet-famous. Admittedly, studies on the internet-famous have acknowledged fan activity. For instance, Marwick (2015) described how YouTuber Miranda Sings receives fan mail and is approached by fans, while Abidin (2015b) traced how followers of influencer mothers set up fan accounts and shared posts and fan art of the influencers’ children, augmenting the children’s fame. However, there has yet to be a body of literature dedicated to the in-depth investigation of the practices of their fans. In this chapter, I discuss fan-run Instagram fan accounts of YouTuber Jojo Siwa (@itsjojosiwa). Siwa (born  2003) first gained public recognition as a cast member on Lifetime’s Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition in  2013 and Dance Moms in  2015–2016. In  2015, she started a YouTube channel and has since amassed a social media following (over 9.6 and 8.2 million followers on YouTube and Instagram respectively, as of April 2019). In 2017, she signed an ‘overall talent’ deal with Nickelodeon, parlaying her reality TV and internet fame into merchandise collaborations with chain retailers like Claire’s and WalMart (Krischer, 2017; Nickelodeon, 2017). Apart from YouTube, Siwa and her followers (‘Siwanators’) are active on other social media, particularly Instagram, reflecting a general trend where 95 per cent of Instagram users also use YouTube (Clarke, 2019). While Instagram itself is relatively new, Instagram fan accounts can find their predecessors on earlier forms of media, like print (e.g. fanzines) and other internet platforms (e.g. fan sites). Within fan studies, the lens of participatory culture is commonly used to analyse fandom, arguing that fans assert their agency away from media producers to create a transformative experience (Gray et al., 2007; Jenkins, 2012; Smith, 1999). There are also concerns that fans provide free labour for the media industry (Murray, 2004) though others argue that fandom is a gift economy where fannish activities generate value for fans (Chin, 2014; Hellekson, 2009, 2015). While Instagram fan accounts can be all of the above, existing theorization focuses on objects of fandom, which is the thing or person the fan adores, and platforms that are fundamentally different from those in this chapter.

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Firstly, the object of fandom is a YouTuber, whose fame is built upon calculated microcelebrity practice on social media. Microcelebrity is a method of presenting one-self through performed intimacy to be consumed by others they consider fans (Marwick and boyd,  2011; Senft,  2008,  2013). Although economically successful, microcelebrity practitioners have fewer followers than traditional celebrities like movie stars, they sustain themselves through gathering enough fans on social media while remaining obscure to most people (Marwick,  2015). However, it is important to note the increasing industrialization of microcelebrity practice as internet fame becomes intertwined with traditional media and other commercial entities (Marwick, 2018). Siwa’s Instagram posts include pictures of herself or images promoting new YouTube videos or merchandise. Despite the abundance of content, there are no characters or narratives to ‘poach’ from in the ways demonstrated in existing fan studies such as Jenkins (2012). There also is little extra information for fans to uncover, such as behind-the-scenes photos that are important to conceptually similar practices like fan websites, since practicing microcelebrity already implies simulating an authentic, behind-the-scenes self to one’s audience (Abidin, 2015a, 2016). Secondly, the Instagram platform is primarily an image-sharing social network, unlike the text-based or multimedia platforms studied in existing fan research such as fan fiction forums (e.g. De Kosnik,  2009), blogs (e.g. Théberge, 2005), and fan sites (e.g. Chin, 2014). While users can use hashtags and mentions, Instagram does not extensively catalogue large amounts of information and text-heavy content in the same ways other online fan platforms do, such as having topically organized forum boards. In addition, a fan need not visit a dedicated, bounded fan space to access content on fan Instagram accounts, but can allow fandom-related posts to be integrated into their feed alongside content from other accounts they follow. In this chapter, I expand our knowledge of fan cultures by addressing microcelebrity fandom. In addition, I explore the fan practices that arise from a social, image-based platform like Instagram, as current literature on online fan cultures favors bounded fan spaces and/or those containing vast amounts of text-based information. In doing so, I highlight how fan communities can exist without some of the affordances these other platforms provide. Findings show that through various presentation and interaction strategies on Instagram, fans perform unique practices that contribute firstly to status-accumulation, secondly to drawing the boundaries of fandom, and lastly to fan archiving.

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Method Hine (2015) argues that while prolonged immersion in traditional ethnography allows researchers to ‘formulate and reject emergent theories in the face of on-going engagement with the field’ (56), these objectives can be achieved by pursuing connections in the absence of physical co-presence. After I identified an  object of fandom (Siwa) to contextualize fans’ activities, I conducted participant observation from the ‘observer as participant’ (Brennen,  2013) position, which prioritizes observation over participation. Several fan-run Instagram accounts were identified through pursuing connections via mentions (e.g. @itsjojosiwa) and hashtags (e.g. #siwanators), and three individual female fans (aged 10, 17, and 27) who resided in Singapore helped to sieve out worthy fan accounts and interpret some fan practices. It should be noted that the 10-year-old was interviewed in the presence of her mother. Attention was paid to the anatomy of accounts, the content posted, the conversations, and how posts related to Siwa’s social media. I sought the opinions of fans of different ages as Siwa has adopted distinct roles in her career (i.e. dancer, YouTuber, Nickelodeon personality), each of which has attracted followers varied in age and/or interests. For example, as a Nickelodeon overall talent, her audience is predominantly female tweens and teens, while as a cast member of Dance Moms, she was known among dancers and dance enthusiasts. However, fans’ interests can merge. For instance, an individual who knew her from YouTube may take an interest in the Dance Moms show. Busse (2012) highlighted that fans perceive their communities to exist in a closed space even if they are freely accessible to others. They also may not disclose their fan identity to non-fans and thus may not appreciate being associated with their fannish works. This is due to reasons like a sense of shame from associated with being a fan (Zubernis and Larsen, 2012) and stereotypes of fans being irrational (Jensen, 1992). Busse (2012) argues that while humanities research dictate that readers can easily locate the text we study, fandom scholars are ethically obligated to protect the fandom they write about, for in ‘the fan world, the text-author dichotomy upon which humanities scholarship rests does not exist’ (39). However, protecting online fan spaces is challenging as the searchability of text renders direct quotes easily traceable to individuals. I turn to internet-based research precedents to address these challenges: boyd (2015) paraphrased social media quotes to ensure participants’ privacy. Similarly, Hine (2015) advises quoting sparingly and to ‘devise ways of adapting quotations so

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that the sense comes through but direct searchability back to the source is not possible’ (162). Even though I only analysed public accounts, I paraphrased or described content rather than use direct quotes and screenshots as a form of respect to Siwanators.

Fan practices on Instagram Self-presentation on social media It is useful to consider fans’ Instagram activities in relation to other practices across social media. There have been numerous studies documenting how individuals employ presentation strategies online to engage in impression management (e.g. Birnholtz, 2018; Chua and Chang, 2016; Schau and Gilly, 2003). Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor is often used to explain the meanings of individuals’ online activity (Hogan,  2010). In this framework, interpersonal interaction is like a performance, where individuals attempt to guide others’ impressions through their appearance, manner, and setting in their front-stage region (Goffman, 1956). Zhao et al. (2013) note the congruence between this metaphor and social media practices, as these practices are ‘socially embedded and observed, activating concerns about others’ expectations’ (2). However, Hogan (2010) argued that adopting Goffman’s approach to social media has its limitations and proposed two forms of self-presentation – performance (as in Goffman’s approach) and exhibition – to address synchronous and asynchronous interactions respectively. Social media is an ‘exhibition space’ (Hogan,  2010:  377) where digital artifacts are accumulated, curated, and managed, turning it into ‘a long-term identity “exhibition,” rather than that of an ephemeral performance’ (Zhao et  al.,  2013:  1). Further, individuals can simultaneously practise both forms of self-presentation online (Zhao et al., 2013). While these conceptualizations of self-presentation focus on individuals’ practices, Instagram fan account owners’ actions can also be conceived as attempts at impression management. Like individuals trying to control how others see themselves online, fan owners strive to present their account (and by extension themselves) in the best possible light within their fandom and achieve specific goals that are valuable to the fan. I will discuss three types of fan activity on Instagram: establishing one’s position in the fandom, drawing borders around

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the fandom, and archiving. I show that through fans’ presentation practices on Instagram, they perform functions found in other fan communities, albeit with some variation.

Communicating status: The anatomy of a fan Instagram account Instagram, like other social media, operates on the logic of reputation metrics, which ‘gauges the social power of a name, profile or image’ (Cardon, 2016: 101) by measuring users’ exposure and capacity to propagate their message. Lay users  can assess an account by viewing its number of followers, hearts, and comments on posts without further interactions or contributions, such as subscribing or commenting. For Siwanators, a successful fan account is one that has followers in the thousands, and informants mentioned that they would not usually follow accounts that had too few followers. Being recognized as a fan account is vital for gaining followers. Siwanators use identification markers that allow others to distinguish them as fan accounts by using the affordances of the Instagram platform, reflecting how users adapt their strategies according to the interface characteristics to reinforce their goals in impression management or social orientation (Walther, 2007). The strategies discussed here are using appropriate display pictures, naming the account within a family of usernames, and being strategic with the profile description. Firstly, the display pictures provide important visual cues. Pictures of Siwa, those of the fan with Siwa, and derivative works like fan art or Siwa-themed logos are common identity markers. In general, fan accounts whose display picture is one of the fans with Siwa or with the fan’s original work have more followers, suggesting that these visuals confer more legitimacy. Secondly, usernames are often variations of Siwa’s username ‘itsjojosiwa’ and/or contain the words ‘jojo’, ‘bowbow’, or ‘siwanator’ in them. This functions as an identity marker and an inclusion/exclusion mechanism by displaying the fandom’s vocabulary. Thirdly, the profile description is crucial. Information like whether Siwa or her family members follow the account, and statistics such as how many times the fan has met Siwa, and how many times Siwa or her family members have liked their posts, joined their live stream, or opened their DMs (direct messages) are listed. This is coupled with stylistic elements, like the use of bow emoji (bows are Siwa’s signature hair accessory, and her pet dog is called Bowbow), which comes from the fandom’s unique vocabulary.

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Figure 1  Examples of profile descriptions. Modelled after actual fan accounts with 7,500 and 12,700 followers, respectively.

Public figures use social media to manage their relationship with their fans (Baym, 2012). Siwa and her family members make use of Instagram’s features such as following and liking to foster friendly fan-celebrity relationships online. Displaying such information sets the fan apart from others by positioning them as having access to and enjoying a higher level of intimacy with Siwa. When it is used with an appropriate display picture and username, they identify the account as a fan account and help visitors to place the fan owner within the fan ecology/ hierarchy. Chin (2018) adapts Bourdieu’s (1984) work on taste to studying fans, conceptualizing fandom as a sociocultural field with its own set of norms. The concepts of social and cultural capital allow us to see fandom as hierarchical and analyse how fans gain status in their fandom (Hills, 2002). This can help us, in the context of social media, to learn ‘how (new) popular fan spaces and the interactions within these platforms contribute to the accumulation of fan status’ (Chin, 2018: 246, parentheses in original). Fans compete for attention from the object of their fandom on social media (Chin,  2018) and receiving some form of acknowledgement elevates one’s standing. Placing statistics to show that the fan has been acknowledged by Siwa positions the fan up front as legitimate and having a high status before the viewer even explores any content in their Instagram account. Despite the appearance of the fan being self-serving, fan hierarchies and a gift economy system coexist. The fan account is a gift to the fandom, where value is generated for fans by fans and giving, receiving, and reciprocating build

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the social fabric of fandom (Pearson,  2010). While fans offer their services for free (monetarily), they are offered ‘within a web of context that specifies an appropriate method of “payment”’ (Hellekson,  2009:  114). Status obtained through follower numbers, likes, comments, and DMs are the ‘payment’ the fan receives based on the interaction norms on Instagram and among Siwanators.

Drawing borders: Games on Instagram Fan account owners post regularly, engage in casual chitchat with others, like posts, and leave comments on each other’s posts with little follow-up. Such actions are significant in terms of how individuals interact on social media in general but are nothing out of the ordinary (Reagle, 2015) and not limited to fan communities. The notable point here is how the basic Instagram features were used for specific outcomes for fans. Siwanator accounts host games where others participate by using Instagram functions. In general, they host three kinds of games. I call the first ‘follower race’, where fans are rallied to help the account reach target follower numbers. For instance, a fan account with more than  7,000 followers posted a photo edit with the text ‘Can we get 200 new followers in one day? We can do it!’, followed by a caption urging followers to repost. The next two games require more knowledge, often making references to Dance Moms (the reality show Siwa was on) or third parties like other YouTubers or Siwa’s friends and family. I call the second game ‘where’s my squad’. A typical example is a ‘role play’ where the host places four to six pictures of Jojo’s friends and asks their followers to pick who they want to be in a first-come-first-served manner. Some characters may be more popular than others, and fans sometimes negotiate for there to be two of the same character or for more characters be added. I call the third game ‘Dance Moms reboot’, where the host posts photos of the Dance Moms cast in a grid or a pyramid to emulate the television show. Participants then either vote individuals off, with every subsequent post having one less photo, or negotiate the ranking shown in the pyramid. There are many variations to ‘where’s my squad’ and ‘Dance Moms reboot’, but it suffices to say that it centres on fandom-sanctioned knowledge. These games have no winner, suggesting that competition is secondary to defining pro-social behaviour and knowledge. For instance, they communicate that it is alright for a Siwanator to also be a fan of certain dancers from Dance Moms but not others because of the narrative of the show. Fan communities patrol the boundaries of fandom, policing what appropriate/inappropriate behaviours are (Hills, 2016; Stanfill, 2013). Similarly,

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Siwanators use games to draw borders around their fandom. They rearticulate attitudes (e.g. positivity and teamwork in ‘follower race’) expressed by Siwa and are thus considered pro-social. They also communicate which inter-fandoms are acceptable. Such actions are not surprising as fan cultures are governed by ‘a common mode of reception, a common set of critical categories and practices, a tradition of aesthetic production, a set of social norms and expectations’ (Tulloch and Jenkins, 1995: 144) and policing fandom’s borders protects ‘one’s own sense of fan community and ascribing positive values to it while trying to exclude others’ (Busse,  2013:  75). Siwanators’ use of unique language and knowledge in presenting their profile (previously discussed) and in their interactions also serve to keep outsiders out. Bow emojis or photo pyramids would only make sense to those in the know. Such practices are similar to the ‘social steganography’ as observed by boyd (2012), where teen social media users limit access to meaning through strategies like in-jokes and cultural references. In this way, Siwanators can keep outsiders away without limiting the public’s access to the fan account.

Documenting my fandom: Instagram as archive De Kosnik (2016) argued that contemporary fan cultures are archival cultures and conceptualized digital fan archives as ‘rogue archives’. They contain cultural material unaffiliated with traditional memory institutions like museums, and rules and procedures are set by the fans. They are also accessible  24/7 at no monetary cost to anyone online. While this definition of rogue archives described dedicated websites made and funded by fans, there are similarities between these and Instagram. Though a private corporation owns Instagram, Instagram content is generally accessible (with the exception of a handful of countries) to anyone with an internet connection. Fan accounts are articulations of fans’ relationships with popular culture and contain material that may not be considered traditionally culturally valuable (Fiske, 1992, 2010). Furthermore, fan Instagram accounts often contain derivative works, making up part of what De Kosnik calls the double helix structure of digital cultural memory – one strand made of ‘appropriations, remixes, and transformative works’ and the other ‘actual archives that exist online which publish and preserve a great deal of digital content’ (11). Lastly, individuals, not platforms, perform the archiving practices. While they are not identical to dedicated fan websites, Instagram fan accounts can still be conceived as an archive. In fact, research on Instagram

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alludes to users’ archiving activity (e.g. Fallon,  2014). A substantial portion of Siwanator accounts are populated by images of Jojo merchandise, reposts of Siwa’s social media posts, rare material (like childhood photos), edits and remixes, and pictures of the account holder and of other fans. The content is similar to its fan website predecessor, which are fan-run archives that contain anything related to the object of fandom. However, Instagram fan accounts differ from De Kosnik’s (2016) rogue archives in two ways: the organization of information and the owner’s visibility. Firstly, unlike a website containing sections with clear categories, information on Instagram is experienced differently – posts on the profile are viewed in reverse chronological order, and recommendations are based on algorithmic biases on the viewer’s feed and through hashtags. Hashtags, a # symbol before keyword, have been described as a user-generated bottom-up way of organizing information on social media (Fallon,  2014; Jensen,  2013). Clicking a hashtag allows one to find posts with the corresponding keyword. While they are widely used on Instagram, Siwanators rarely use it for cataloguing purposes. The keywords serve to identify the post as part of the fandom rather than to document events or objects. For instance, one account with about  7,000 followers posted a drawing and used the following hashtags (the order of tags were changed to prevent direct searchability of the source): #jojomusically #JoJoSiwaMyWorld #lovejojosiwa #siwanatorforlife #dance #jojowiththebowbow #jojosbowparty #boomerang #teamjojosiwa #holdthedrama #siwa #kidinacandystore #jojosjuice #peaceouthaterz #siwanatorz #siwanator #bowbow #imasiwanator #muser #weloveyoujojo #itsjojosiwa #singer #dancer

In this example, the hashtags included terms that referred to Siwanators (e.g. ‘peaceouthaterz’), titles of Siwa’s work (e.g. Jojo’s Juice), and general terms referring to Siwa (e.g. itsjojosiwa). Hashtags were used liberally and served as identity markers, linking the post to the Siwanator fandom. Simultaneously, broad keywords (e.g. dancer) were used to increase the post’s exposure in the hope of gaining followers, which is a common practice on Instagram. However, beyond indicating that the post was from a Siwanator, hashtags were not used for more refined cataloguing. For instance, the fan art was not tagged as such, and other individuals looking for fan art would have to sieve through numerous posts to find them. Thus, tags do not allow ‘categories and collections to emerge across users, creating a multi-perspective, multi-authored media text’

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(Fallon,  2014:  57). Instead, these fan accounts make up a collection of small individual author-centric archives. Secondly, the account owner is figuratively and literally visible. Without specific cataloguing hashtags, posts exist as discrete entities though affiliated to the Siwanator fandom. They also bear the mark of the owner in their content curation. While many fan archives aim for comprehensiveness, individual fans populate their Instagram feed based on their own set of priorities. This suggests that individuals value personal meaning despite their account being an account for fans. This echos findings elsewhere where social media exhibitions, as conceived by Hogan (2010), are valuable for the owner, and where individuals see themselves as the audience for their own social media content (Zhao et al., 2013). When considered in their totality, the fan accounts can be rather comprehensive. However, without norms to use specific tags to organize content, owners archive their own fan experience rather than document the fandom at large. Furthermore, accounts may contain pictures of the owners in the context of being a fan. For example, an account with around 4,500 followers populates her feed with pictures of herself with her Jojo merchandise. Another fan with 7,000 followers posted selfies with other popular fan account owners in what is called a ‘face reveal’ (revealing the face behind the fan accounts). Taking the above discussion into consideration, Instagram fan accounts exist as archives that are at once Jojo Siwa archives (or at least individual fans’ construction of Siwa and Siwanators) and individual fans’ personal archives. At the same time, their posts are weaved into their followers’ feed, suggesting that every follower experiences the fan accounts they subscribe to in individualized ways. As such, fan culture as an archival culture on Instagram is unfocused, simultaneously documenting and telling the stories of multiple people.

Conclusion Instagram fan account owners engage in practices that merge social media selfpresentation in the form of a carefully considered ‘front stage’ (Goffman, 1956) and a curated feed that serves as an ‘exhibition’ (Hogan, 2010) with elements of fan cultures found in other fan communities. These practices help to achieve objectives that are valuable to fans. I discussed how account owners present their profiles to establish their fan identity and status by using an appropriate username, profile picture, and including information that suggests intimacy

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with Siwa. Then, I examined the games fans play as a form of interaction. The games demonstrate desirable behaviour and approved inter-fandoms, drawing boundaries around the fandom. Lastly, I explored how Instagram fan accounts constitute archives where some practices render them more author-centric than fandom-centric. It is worth nothing that these practices were discussed separately to facilitate the organization of information though in reality they overlap. For example, in the ‘where’s my squad’ game, participants may feel that being in the virtual squad of a big-name fan confers them status. Fans on Instagram have norms and hierarchies and are connected through a social network centred on their object of fandom. This suggests the existence of a fan community. However, fan pages frequently repost or respond to the object of fandom’s official posts. At the same time, comment culture, which is social, reactive, and short (Reagle,  2015), thrives on social media, leading to arguments that it dominates everyday interactions with ‘innumerable, mundane forms of public discourse’ (Lovink, 2011: 51). Indeed, Siwanators predominantly post short comments or emojis with little follow-up from others. Some scholars may argue that the Siwanator fandom does not constitute a fan community, for they believe that real fan communities are grassroots efforts (Pearson,  2010) celebrated for their subversion of media producers and dominant ideologies, as well as thoughtful discourse (Gray et al., 2007). However, being a fan assumes the existence of a fan community and even someone enjoying his or her object of fandom alone is participating in an imagined community (Busse and Sandvoss, 2007). Pearson (2010) argues that fandom online is just like all social organizations, with social circles, hierarchies, and conflict. He contemplates, ‘does virtual fandom actually constitute a community?’ (93). It is worth mentioning that much of the existing discussions on fan communities online are focused on dedicated, bounded fan spaces like fan-run websites, or producer-run forums. Thus, we have yet to adequately consider fan cultures in the light of social media platforms, where authorial content production and curation is dispersed in a loose network and validated through capillaries of participation and reciprocity among fans. In addition, the recent proliferation of individuals who achieve fame through microcelebrity practice reflects the existence of a different kind of text and therefore a different kind fan, whose social practices we have inadequate knowledge on. This chapter demonstrates the importance of considering individuals’ actions within the communication norms of social media platforms to make sense of the practices fans engage in and to uncover the expanding range of communities online.

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References Abidin, C. (2015a), ‘Communicative