Ganaele Langlois

Participatory Culture and the New Governance of Communication The Paradox of Participatory Media

This article develops a critical alternative to the common equation between participatory culture and democratic communication and argues that power on online participatory platforms should be understood as the governance of semiotic open-endedness. This article argues that the concept of cultural expression cannot be understood solely by looking at users’ cultural practices, but should be revisited to pay attention to the networked conditions that enable it. This involves tracing the governance of disparate processes such as protocols, software, linguistic processes, and cultural practices that make the production and circulation of meaning possible. Thus, communication on participatory platforms should be understood as the management of flows of meaning, that is, as the processes of codification of the informational, technical, cultural, and semiotic dynamics through which meanings are expressed. This makes it possible to understand the logics through which software platforms transform information into cultural signs and shape users’ perceptions and agencies.

Meaning in the age of social media

Introduction: Meaning and Social Media 1. Governing Meaning 2. Meaning Machines 3. Meaningfulness and Subjectivation 4. Social Networking and the Production of the Self 5. Being in the World Afterword: Social Data and the Politics of Existence

Blogs I read: partisanship and party loyalty in the Canadian blogosphere

ABSTRACT This article builds upon current hyperlink mapping research to determine the degree of party loyalty and partisanship in the Canadian political blogosphere. The article develops a hyperlink-based method of determining blogger endorsements as a means of tracking cross-party recommendations. The article concludes that bloggers affiliated with the governing Conservative Party of Canada exhibit the most cohesive ideological and party loyal set of blog recommendation links.

Economies of reputation: the case of revenge porn

ABSTRACT Revenge porn involves publicly releasing pictures of a person’s sexual activity, along with the means to contact that person, to provoke widespread shaming. This paper analyzes the US-based revenge porn website MyEx.com through discourse, legal, and information network analyses. The paper explores how revenge porn is not only an instance of online sexual violence rooted in abjection but also symptomatic of a new political economy of subjectivity, where both the human-based and the automated, algorithm-based circulation of personal information are at the center of processes through which the self is seen and valued, both socially and economically, by others.

What Are the Stakes in Doing Critical Research on Social Media Platforms

One of the key challenges facing social media studies is the capacity to undertake independent, critical research. As the field of social media is massively dominated by corporate players with a vested interest in both privatizing social data and developing proprietary social analytical tools, it is now crucial to advocate for a politics of public social media research.

Networked campaigns: Traffic tags and cross platform analysis on the web

This article defines a new methodological framework to examine emerging forms of political campaigning on and across Web 2.0 platforms i.e. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter in the North-American context. The proposed method seeks to identify the new strategies that make use of campaign texts, users, keywords, information networks and software code to spread a political communications and rally voters across distributed, and therefore seemingly unmanageable spheres of online communication. The proposed method differentiates itself from previous Web 1.0 methods focused on mapping hyperlinked networks. In particular, we pay attention to the new materiality of the Web 2.0 as constituted by shared objects that circulate across modular platforms. In this paper we develop an object-centered method through the concept of traffic tags --unique identifiers that by enabling the circulation of web objects across platforms organize political activity online. By tracing the circulation of traffic tags, we can map different sets of relationships among uploaded and shared web objects text, images, videos, etc., political actors online partisans, political institutions, bloggers, etc., and web based platforms social network sites, search engines, political websites, blogs, etc..

Media Informatics: Theory, methods, and tools

Panel abstract: Although the full range of new media has yet to be defined, traditional media such as journalism, music, film, photography, sculpture, theater, the written and spoken word, performance and installation art are all morphing as digital, socially networked technologies present new opportunities. Hybrid new media objects and environments are emerging that blur distinctions and pose new challenges to information science researchers. The immense scale and rapidity of the transition to digital spheres is clear but the multi-modal consequences are only beginning to be explored. Media Informatics is the study of how humans seek, use, share, manipulate, store, retrieve, and organize digital multimedia. Closely related to Informatics and to Media Ecology, Media Informatics studies the behaviors and practices related to new media objects and environments including social, political, entertainment, communication and information aspects of new media content in order to design and develop tools for media access, retrieval and storage. The intent of this panel is not to argue for the establishment of media informatics as a formal discipline in need of its own association, etc. Instead we argue that media informatics is the direction to which traditional informatics is evolving and we make the case for greater affinity with media ecologists as collaborators in this evolution. This panel will present an overview of media informatics including theoretical frameworks, tools, methods and research applications in current use. The first presentation outlines the background, scope and methodology of media informatics, while each of the subsequent three presentations deals with a specific new media informatics research project.