#BOREDWITHMEG': Gendered Boredom and Networked Media

2017

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, notions of performativity, and immaterial labor in the late-capitalist US. Throughout, the girl remains the pivotal figure; by desiring what is and what, in turn, becomes desirable, she shapes the consumer market as much as she is subject or victim to it. Whether or not this allows her to beco...

Ethos, 2020

Popular narratives on digital media practices are often entrenched in psychologized and apolitical frameworks that ascribe simplistic labels of addiction and deficiencies to digital practices of marginalized youths in particular. This paper explores ethnographically the social complexities behind polemicized, mundane, and apparently meaningless digital practices such as scrolling through social-media feeds. The author links elements of interfaces designed to grab attention, erase effort, and enable flow, with everyday struggles of youths faced with unemployment, waiting, and boredom. Scrolling is conceptualized as an embodied everyday practice

2016

This doctoral thesis examines youthful femininities in an intimate public on the blogging platform Tumblr, interrogating how the self is produced through identity work negotiating the postfeminist tension between the individual and the social. The public is built around a set of self-representative blogs narrating moments of everyday youthful feminine experience through GIFs and captions. My study analyses the circulation and readership of the blog, WhatShouldWeCallMe (‘WSWCM’) and five of its adaptations, in order to explore how young women negotiate the tension between the self and the social in this context of everyday, mediated sociality (the ‘WSWCM public’). Motivated by the question of how highly individualistic, seemingly impossible and contradictory postfeminist subjectivities may be lived and enacted, I analyse how femininities are relationally produced in this blog-based public. The thesis is principally divided into four data chapters. I first theorise the affective relat...

2019

Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media Paula Harper Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulation—“viral.” This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the web’s celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomena—the production, watching, listening to, circulation, or “sharing” of such objects—has constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christop...

2021

This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and video-maker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2015

This article analyzes the gendered expectations of authenticity in online amateur media performances through a reading of the 2006 vlog series lonelygirl15. Actress Jessica Rose was part of an artistic collective that created the character of Bree, a teenage girl who posted a series of confessional vlogs on YouTube under the screen name lonelygirl15. The vlog quickly went viral due, in part, to the almost immediate suspicion that the series was "fake." Through a close reading of both the coverage of the sting that revealed Bree's true identity, and the narrative of the series itself, the author illustrates how the series aestheticizes precarity in order to facilitate escalating modes of intimacy with Bree's character. By placing such demands within the longer history of girls' media production, such as the video work of Sadie Benning and Camgirl websites, this article argues that the reaction to the series makes visible the increasing political significance of the entanglement of economic concerns and identity production within the networked social sphere.

Continuum, 2021

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series Fleabag (BBC/Amazon Prime, 2016-‘19) has been praised for its revitalization of direct address. Whereas this device is often used to foster intimacy between character and audience, I argue that Fleabag problematizes this. I examine the nature of Fleabag’s address through the lens of habits of constant connectivity in online attention economies in conjunction with gendered norms of self-representation on social media, and their impact on the nature and modes of human attention. Through a textual and cinematic analysis with attention to editing, camera, mode of address, and acting, I claim that Fleabag’s attention-seeking performance enforces an intimacy that is gradually revealed to serve as a distraction, and that this is reinforced by the show’s entire aesthetic. By foregrounding these issues, and through its aesthetic of distraction, Fleabag investigates the relational implications of multi-tasking lives and probes the boundaries of contemporary attention.

2021

This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and videomaker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.

2010

Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth's social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States. Integrating twenty-three different case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis. This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

2010

These edited volumes were created through an interactive community review process and published online and in print in December 2007. They are the precursors to the peer-reviewed monographs in the series. electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

PhD thesis, 2020

This thesis explores how digital technologies such as social media, smart devices and gaming platforms are shaping young people’s sexual cultures. While the majority of research on young people’s digital sexual cultures has maintained a narrow focus on risk and harm, and limited what digital practices are considered relevant and for whom, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to support children and young people to navigate the complexities of an ever-changing digital sexual age. I worked with a socio-economically and culturally diverse sample of twenty-five young people aged 11 – 18 years from England and Wales. Rather than focusing on a pre-defined set of digital practices, I set out to foster a creative, curious and open-ended approach that allowed participants to identify which digital practices mattered to them. Over a period of fifteen- months, I employed a range of creative, visual and arts-based methods in group and individual interviews to explore a flexible set of core issues including digital worlds, relationships, networked body cultures and media discourses. Taking inspiration from feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘affect’, ‘phallogocentricism’ and ‘feminist figurations’, I trace normative articulations of gender and sexuality as well as activate different ways of seeing and relating to young people’s digital sexual cultures. My data highlights the enduring force of heteronormative and phallogocentric power relations in young people’s digital sexual cultures through the publicisation of intimate relations online, social media’s visual culture of bodily display and gendered harassment online. However, it also maps ruptures and feminist figurations that displace vision away from the heteronormative and phallogocentric mode. I illustrate how young people’s digital sexual cultures can be the site of unexpected and unpredictable relations that move beyond normative notions of (hetero)sexuality and towards possibilities for re-imagined sexualities that exceed heteronormative and phallogocentric norms.

This article is a critical case study of black girls' user-generated content based on a beta study of over 670 bedroom twerking videos. It is a continuing investigation into the significant roles that music and technology play in the repeated and normalizing gender performativity of racialized sexual surveillance and intersectional stratification of gender, age, and race on YouTube.

mwsmediapodcasts.com

This book is a synthesis of three years of collaborative, ethnographic work conducted through a project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: "Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media."