DNA sequencers, Twitter, MRIs, Facebook, particle accelerators, Google Books, radio telescopes, Tumblr: what do these things have in common? According to the evangelists of “data science,” all of these are instruments for observing reality at unprecedentedly large scales and fine granularities. This perspective ignores the social reality of these very different technological systems, ignoring how they are made, how they work, and what they mean in favor of an exclusive focus on what they generate: Big Data. But no data, (...) big or small, can be interpreted without an understanding of the process that generated them. Statistical data science is applicable to systems that have been designed as scientific instruments, but is likely to lead to confusion when applied to systems that have not. In those cases, a historical inquiry is preferable. (shrink)

This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and (...) blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom. (shrink)

We analyse how memes construct networks of feminist critique and response, mobilising the derisive laughter that energises current feminisms. Using the 2012 case of the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme, we argue that feminist memes create online spaces of consciousness raising and community building. The timeliness, humorous affect and media techné of meme propagators become significant infrastructures for feminist critique, what we term ‘doing feminism in the network’. If the Internet is particularly good at facilitating the diffusion of feminist jokes, (...) as others argue, we illustrate how the networking and distribution capacities of social media platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and the online shopping site Amazon.com also cultivate new modes of feminist cultural critique and models of political agency for practising feminism through meme production and propagation. (shrink)

"Nonsense Lab" is the unofficial name of a studio space that hosted Sean Smith and the Department of Biological Flow at University of Western Ontario. Here, in an offhand reflexive tumblr post, the infrastructural thematics of acoustic ecology, perceptual programming and media environments are cut across and sewn together.

When thinking about Frank M. Oppenheim’s legacy, one cannot help but think, first and foremost, about his many contributions to Royce scholarship. Yet I personally have had some difficulty imagining how to characterize Oppenheim’s contributions to Royce scholarship until late 2013. Prior to that time, the more I thought about how to characterize his contributions to Royce scholarship, the less I became able to imagine an appropriate characterization of them. Then, on an autumn afternoon in 2013, I stumbled across a (...) Tumblr post, written by Missy H. Dunaway, that caught my attention. The title of that post was “‘The Lonely’ Lighthouse Keeper.” Dunaway’s post was an entertaining yet sad account of her fascination with... (shrink)

This article examines ethical implications from workplace romances that may subsequently turn into sexual harassment through the use of social media technologies, such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, text messaging, IMing, and other forms of digital communication between office colleagues. We examine common ethical models such as Jones (Acad Manag Rev 16:366–395, 1991) issue-contingent decision-making model, Rest’s (Moral development: Advances in research and theory, 1986) Stages of Ethical Decision-Making model, and Pierce and Aguinis’s (J Org Behav 26(6):727–732,2005) review of workplace (...) romance versus sexual harassment issues. The article makes a contribution by developing a new communication ethics model that includes response positive and response negative contingencies to guide decision-making about inappropriate social media contacts that spillover into the workplace. In addition, we recommend that human resource personnel take a more active role in communicating appropriate ethical rules of conduct concerning the use of social media technologies inside and outside the office. (shrink)