Ilana Gershon

Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age

In interviews with Indiana University college students, undergraduates insisted that Facebook could be a threat to their romantic relationships. Some students choose to deactivate their Facebook accounts to preserve their relationships. No other new media was described as harmful. This article explores why Facebook was singled out. I argue that Facebook encourages (but does not require) users to introduce a neoliberal logic to all their intimate relationships, which these particular users believe turns them into selves they do not want to be.

Introduction: The Newness of New Media

When scholars of media attend to the material and historical particularities of media, many recognise that ‘newness’ is not a self-evident social category (see Marvin 1988; Gitelman 2006; Gitelman and Pingree 2003; Peters 1999; Larkin 2008; Ginsburg et al. 2002). Instead, they explore how people on the ground interpret and make use of the newness of their media. In the process these scholars have shed light on how people discuss and experience their changing social contexts through their engagement with these different forms. Studying the newness of new media involves understanding people as social analysts in their own right, and exploring how they think about communication and change. Today the media technologies that are understood as new – the Internet, mobile phones and social networking sites – provide another venue for innovation and continuity, as well as a means to reflect on how newness is constituted. In this special issue, the authors explore how the ‘newness’ of new media is experienced by people outside of the Global North, ranging from how communities have and are responding to the introduction of writing to the introduction of mobile phones and social networking sites. To understand how newness is constructed, the authors in this issue were guided by three types of intellectual investments: a focus on history, on media ecologies and on media ideologies. We will expand on each of these in turn. The focus on history is two-fold. All of the sites explored arise out of the aftermath of colonial encounters. This may be most obvious in Courtney Handman’s essay, as she writes about how Tok Pisin as a language emerged from colonial encounters, then became crucial as a symbol and form of communication as Papua New Guinea (PNG) became a nation and, lastly, has changed yet again through texting to serve Papua New Guineans’ contemporary needs for simultaneously more local and cosmopolitan identification. Not only does she provide a compelling example of language transformation,

Actor-network theory and documentary studies

ABSTRACT This article examines how science studies in general and actor—network theory (ANT) in particular can inform scholarship on documentary. More specifically, we argue that both ANT scholars and documentary scholars are faced with the question of how a particular set of interactions are transformed into representations of reality that can travel into other contexts with their truth value intact. The ANT perspective views putative truth as circulating through a series of networks shaped through specific interactions, and identifies the interlinking of the networks as crucial to the preservation of truth value across them. Furthermore, the ANT perspective provides tools for understanding how representations are transformed into facts through the labour of specific networks. We thus refuse sharp distinctions between documentary production, distribution and reception, and instead see all aspects as central to how documentaries themselves function as actants and representations.

“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man”: Typing the neoliberal self into a branded existence

This article discusses personal branding, a performance genre that many job seekers in the United States are told to master in order to get a job. I discuss the specific techniques you are supposed to use to brand yourself, some of the origins of these techniques, and the reasons why people find it challenging to put these techniques into practice. I analyze the self that personal branding assumes everyone should be able to present to others by deploying a set of semiotic practices meant to create the impression of a coherent authentic self. Personal branding is treated as a lens into some lived dilemmas that emerge when one tries to put a model of a neoliberal self into practice, with special attention drawn to the tension between flexibility and legibility.

Documentary Studies and Linguistic Anthropology

This article suggests that linguistic anthropology offers useful analytical tools to documentary studies because both fields wrestle with questions that emerge from the circulation of indexical representations that are putatively constructing truths. Linguistic anthropology is deeply concerned with the ways that texts circulate, and how this circulation affects how indexical representations are structured and how constructions of reality are produced. The question this article tackles is: how can insights that linguistic anthropologists have been developing about circulation, indexicality, and the construction of facts be usefully mobilised to think about documentaries?

Publish and be damned: New media publics and neoliberal risk

The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter ‘don’t they know better than to press send?’ In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tendencies to attribute ignorance or misguided selfishness to unwelcome behavior. In the United States, there are multiple and mutually defining understandings of how publics are constituted. Historically, these ideas often change when Americans respond to the ways new technologies alter how communication is made public or private. This is an ethnographic account of one way that multiple publics are seen to co-exist uneasily as people negotiate the newness of new media. Grounded in my ethnographic research, I explore how cautionary stories about ‘pressing send’ reflect neoliberal concerns about allocating risk and responsibility among individual choice-makers.