Andrew Whelan

Sick bunnies and pocket dumps: "Not-selfies" and the genre of self-representation

ABSTRACT This article develops and troubles existing approaches to visual self-representation in social media, questioning the naturalized roles of faces and bodies in mediated self-representation. We argue that self-representation in digital communication should not be treated as synonymous with selfies, and that selfies themselves should not be reductively equated with performances of embodiment. We do this through discussing “not-selfies”: visual self-representation consisting of images that do not feature the likenesses of the people who share them, but instead show objects, animals, fictional characters, or other things, as in the practices of #EDC (“everyday carry”) and #GPOY (“gratuitous picture of yourself”) on platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and reddit. We present an account of self-representation as an emergent, recognizable, intertextual genre, and show that #EDC and #GPOY practices are best conceptualized as instances of self-representation.

Ethics Are Admin: Australian Human Research Ethics Review Forms as (Un)Ethical Actors:

In Australian universities, social research projects secure institutional approval as ethical through research ethics committees, and are defined and communicated to these committees through standardized local application forms. In organizational terms, ethics are instituted first as an administrative ritual anterior to research, and routinely elided as such. The documentation constituting this ritual thus bears scrutiny, in terms of what it says and what it does, and in turn, what it requires applicants to say and do. Such scrutiny is a means of fleshing out the standard critique of prospective ethics review from social media researchers: that the opportunity for a proper conversation about research ethics in the community of researchers is supplanted by an administrative exercise in “box ticking.” This paper discusses these ethics application forms, attending specifically to the ethical consequences of the stance they require the applicant to take with respect to prospective research participants, and the implications of their formulation of research as a process of data extraction.

The Digital Music Boundary Object

Digital music is heterogeneous: what is brought under or left outside of the umbrella of digital music differs. Nowak and Whelan demonstrate this with reference to three examples: the 2007 release of In Rainbows by Radiohead as a ‘pay-what-you-want’ download, the 2010 leak of Autechre’s Oversteps, and the fan videos set to the Phoenix song ‘Lisztomania’, discussed by law professor Lawrence Lessig. They use the concept of the ‘boundary object’, as developed in science and technology studies and in anthropology, to describe how digital music works in these conversations. Pointing out that these stories and others like them foreground particular perspectives and moral orientations, they highlight how digital music serves as a vehicle for the expression of political imaginings of value and cultural and social exchange.

The Morality of the Social in Critical Accounts of Popular Music

Talk about music, broadly understood, is commonly conducted and regarded as a neutral or transparent window on its topic. However, both vernacular and formal-analytic scholarly accounts constitute music as morally significant, and in doing so, articulate particular narratives of the social. One such contextual frame of reference for talking about music is presented and described here as ‘art vs. commerce’. A close analysis is conducted of a sentence in a recent academic paper (with attention to its conceptual buttressing in antecedent texts), and of the opening of a research interview with a musician, so as to show how contemporary articulations of this framework operate, and to demonstrate that vernacular and sociological forms of such thinking are contiguous, and can be taken as analytical objects in their own right. The intellectual and cultural mechanics of this moral work conducted by the articulation of art vs. commerce are highlighted and evaluated. The argument is not that such forms of talk or writing about music are to be ‘cleared out of the way’ so that music can finally be attended to, but rather that these forms of talk serve to constitute the fields of meaning within which music is understood.

‘Extreme’ music and graphic representation online

Previously obscure musical genres, traditionally mediated by tape trading, mail order and the like, become relatively public as they migrate into online environments. The niche is now easily available in ‘pirated’ format: mp3 blogs post links to material which was previously only available on limited-run cassette or vinyl. Such material also circulates widely on peer-to-peer networks, and listeners can conveniently find each other and new bands through platforms such as Last.fm. One such genre is considered here: power electronics or ‘noise’. The textual and visual material around power electronics is presented as a limit case for considering the grounds upon which censorship operates in Australia. Power electronics has a longstanding thematic preoccupation with transgressive content, and it addresses such issues from a complex and sometimes indeterminate position, ultimately leaving judgement with the listener. However, such material appears increasingly problematic where there is no grasp of the context of use, and no grasp of the often surprisingly nuanced approach taken by the artists and fans involved. Ambivalence is characteristic of the subtle orientations evident in power electronics, and this has in the past led to interpretive problems inside and outside of the subculture. Regardless of whether an argument can be made about the aesthetic merits of this genre, its increasing online visibility is inflected in the Australian context by a legal framework likely to criminalise it ‘on sight’. This is an imposition which obfuscates the meaning of the material, its social use, and most seriously, the broader societal context which gives rise to such material in the first place.