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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Recent media scholarship has demonstrated how social media reinvents how the ways that people build collective resistance through online activism. Much of this scholarship has focused on relatively stable social media posts. This presentation draws from the work of feminist scholars and adds to these conversations by considering the ways that online activism is again being reinvented through emerging ephemeral features, such as Instagram Live. I draw from survey and interview responses collected in Fall 2019 from participants who used #NotAgainSU, subsequent interviews, and a close analysis of social media affordances. In the first part of the presentation, I augment existing scholarship about ephemeral features by focusing on what those features mean for activists to develop a heuristic for analysis of Live features. (1) Drawing from Steele’s (2021) analysis of digital Black feminist practices, Live features can be understood through capture/control. (2) Live features can be understood through access and “networked intimacy” (Highfield, et al., 2020). (3) Finally, Live features implicate embodiment through the traditionally embodied feminist practice of memory (Welch 1999). Using this heuristic, in the second part of this presentation, I explore the complicated issues around questions about when and how ephemeral online content become “public,” or is shared with other audiences in more permanent posts. I contend it is important to consider whether this is a collective or individual decision. Lastly, I explore how practices like screen recording for hostile audiences can also preserve the memory of ephemeral social media posts in a de-contextualized way.
Memory and Publicity in Ephemeral Social Media: A Case study of #NotAgainSU
Recent media scholarship has demonstrated how social media reinvents how the ways that people build collective resistance through online activism. Much of this scholarship has focused on relatively stable social media posts. This presentation draws from the work of feminist scholars and adds to these conversations by considering the ways that online activism is again being reinvented through emerging ephemeral features, such as Instagram Live. I draw from survey and interview responses collected in Fall 2019 from participants who used #NotAgainSU, subsequent interviews, and a close analysis of social media affordances. In the first part of the presentation, I augment existing scholarship about ephemeral features by focusing on what those features mean for activists to develop a heuristic for analysis of Live features. (1) Drawing from Steele’s (2021) analysis of digital Black feminist practices, Live features can be understood through capture/control. (2) Live features can be understood through access and “networked intimacy” (Highfield, et al., 2020). (3) Finally, Live features implicate embodiment through the traditionally embodied feminist practice of memory (Welch 1999). Using this heuristic, in the second part of this presentation, I explore the complicated issues around questions about when and how ephemeral online content become “public,” or is shared with other audiences in more permanent posts. I contend it is important to consider whether this is a collective or individual decision. Lastly, I explore how practices like screen recording for hostile audiences can also preserve the memory of ephemeral social media posts in a de-contextualized way.
Bio
Corinne Jones is a visiting lecturer of Technical Communications in the English department at the University of Central Florida. Corinne will be joining the University of Michigan as a Marsh Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Communication and Media Studies Department,