Home of Hope: Voicings, Whiteness, and the Technological Gaze

This chapter explores the transition from audience studies to cyberethnography on the basis of the author’s own experience in doing research in computer- mediated communication and in teaching in online environments. The chapter describes her experience in developing methodologies for studying Internet inter- actions through theoretical perspectives by drawing on postcolonial feminist theories and critical cultural studies. Doing ethnography at online/offline inter- sections requires a hands-on approach, whereby the researcher works to build techno-mediated contexts while simultaneously living in them and also staying connected to related contexts offline. Such an immersive methodology allows the researcher to understand computer-mediated communication in global envi- ronments. In particular, the author refers to her experience of the “South Asian Women’s network (SAWnet) refusal,” as she developed her cyberethnographic methodologies in the early 1990s. She describes her experience in developing appropriate research methods to study such Internet-based global media.

Social Media and Society: Integrating the Digital with the Social in Digital Discourse, 2023

This chapter incorporates and draws on the concept of affect to examine how users' discursive practice is reshaped by the design of interactive digital platforms. An affective critical discourse analysis approach is developed to analyse the affective-discursive loop by using Internet users' practice of regional discriminatory discourses against Henan people as a case study. Through the comparison between users' differing practices on two major Chinese news portals-Tencent and NetEase, this chapter unveils the extent to which regional discrimination is amplified by the locative IP-address function of NetEase news portal's user commentary system. This chapter makes a methodological contribution in response to the CDS notion of discursive power in the digital realm.

Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology, 2013

The Mutual Co-Construction of Online and Onground in Cyborganic: Making an Ethnography of Networked Social Media Speak to Challenges of the Posthuman 11 Jennifer Cool 2. We Were Always Human 33 Zeynep Tufekci 3. Manufacturing and Encountering "Human" in the Age of Digital Reproduction 49 Matthew Bernius 4. The Digital Graveyard: Online Social Networking Sites as Vehicles of Remembrance 71 Jenny Ryan viii contents 5. Anonymous, Anonymity, and the End(s) of Identity and Groups Online: Lessons from the "First Internet-Based Superconsciousness" 89

Challenging images? Dominant, residual and emergent meanings in on-line media representations of child poverty Original Citation Fink, Janet and Lomax, Helen (2014) Challenging images? Dominant, residual and emergent meanings in on-line media representations of child poverty. Journal for the study of British cultures, 21 (1). pp. 79-95.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

More than two decades after China was first connected to the Internet, scholars still debate the political impact of online media. Yet, the debate is stalled by a limited view of both politics and the media's role in political contestation. In order to offer a more nuanced account of the relationship between online media and politics, this article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive struggles, identifies strategies to contest hegemonic discourses, and employs a broadened notion of politics, referred to as minimal politics. The framework is then used to analyze a corpus of Weibo (microblog) posts published by the charity organization, Love Save Pneumoconiosis (LSP). LSP activists use Weibo to campaign for medical treatment for workers with pneumoconiosis, and the article identifies two strategies of contestation in LSP activists' online activism. First, LSP activists articulate alternative discourses that challenge the hegemony of official discourses. Second, LSP activists' discourses are polyphonic expressions that legitimize the organization's work, while subtly politicizing the problem of pneumoconiosis. The strategies of contestation used by LSP activists exemplify how political contestation is possible in repressive contexts and illustrate the need to refine the theories used to study the political impact of online media.

30 years of civil conflict and a few minutes tsunami left Aceh crawling with “orphans”, that is, children who have lost at least one of their parents. There are no final statistics on the subject, but according to the Dinas Sosial (Dinsos - Department of Social Affairs) , in the region, in 2009 there were at least 80.000 orphans (about 69.000 of them lost their father, 7.000 lost their mother, 4.000 lost both parents). Sources in the Organisasi Konferens Islam (OKI – Islamic Relief) add at least 40.000 more . This made up for roughly 20% of the whole of Aceh population aged between 0 and 19 (Aceh dalam angka 2008), and points to orphanhood as a somewhat normal condition for post conflict Acehnese children . As Helen Morton (1996:7-18) underlines, “childhood” is a collective process and children contribute to shaping culture as much as they are receivers of their elders’ cultural heritage. Besides, in the specific Indonesian case, Strassler shows how some children are trained to voice an interpretation of their times which becomes dominant through the mediatic use of the very idea of “child” (Strassler 2006). I hold, then, that in the era of peace, Acehnese culture is going to be deeply marked by the presence of the orphans and their experience of themselves, as well as by the discourse on orphans and “neglected” children; already, what is said and done about children says a lot about Aceh’s conception of the future. Unveiling a fragment of this process is the matter of this article. More specifically, I consider some Acehnese orphans who grow up in institutions called panti asuhan, “home for the care of the needy”, as well as in dayah or pesantren, Islamic residential schools . My fieldwork has revolved around some of these institutions, their inmates, their families and the groups they come from in Aceh Besar and Bireuen . The children I worked with were between 7 and 18 years old, with a large majority in the 10-16 age span. In the following pages, I first describe what the idea of “orphanhood” conveys for the Acehnese I came in touch with, then turn to the dialogue between families and institutions in some specific cases. This will relate the astonishingly large majority of fatherless children (yatim) to practices and ideas of marriage and parenthood in a matrilocal, albeit not uniquely matrilineal, society, where single women (janda) are not an exception. The conclusions highlight how fatherless and motherless children must be considered with attention, especially as far as the “conflict orphans” are concerned, and how the idea of peace seems to be gendered and points to a transformation in gender ideologies.

A world dominated by instant media replays, I-reports, Facebook-postings and Twitters on current events has brought into focus new media’s increasing power and its capability to challenge traditional forms of institutional communication and collaboration. Forums like YouTube have established themselves as exemplary social network systems and platforms offering extraordinary levels of access to cultural texts. Rapidly becoming one of the primary sites for consumption, circulation, search and exchange as well as production of a variety of videos, an archive of media moments on a global society’s evolving experiences, YouTube may easily be called the creative warehouse of our contemporary transnational society. In this study, I look at a series of YouTube videos on “New India” which aim to redefine the nation’s identity by focusing on the transformation of the society’s cultural and architectural production as well as its spatial expression. This paper proposes that YouTube, with its motto “Broadcast yourself,” empowers the ubiquitous 21st-century prosumer and provides a platform for mobilizing multiple perspectives on current issues, which had often been overridden by dominant official narratives. By critically examining YouTube as an archival tool recording a transition in India’s national imaginary, it is possible to get novel insights into how new media is redefining the postcolonial society’s political, social and cultural production processes as the nation emerges into a new global reality.